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1896

Somerville College

Posted in:

Academia

Author:

EMHAI

Somerville College houses archival materials related to the Oxford Majlis, which was a student society modeled after the Cambridge Majlis and the Oxford Union. It was a broadly left-wing and anti-imperialist forum for students who came from South Asia, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The society hosted debates and social events, with notable speakers including Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. Members include Liaquat Ali Khan, who became the first Prime Minister of Pakistan and was heavily involved with the Indian independence movement.

Kamal Hossain, who drafted the first constitution for Bangladesh, reflected on the history of the Majlis in a magazine published in 1986. In it, he highlighted the difficulty with which leaders of independence movements (including him) negotiated their experiences as students at Oxford with the university’s position as an imperial centre. Kamal suggested that these leaders would often discuss their time in Oxford with ambivalence. This poses interesting questions about the extent to which networking and connection-making affected the politicisation of these individuals.

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Sources and Attribution

See: Anuj Mishra, 'Can you revive something that’s long dead?: the Oxford Majlis', Cherwell (1st December 2023). Also see: 'The Majlis in the Mid-Fifties', by Kamal Hossain.

Aleena Din - Aleena is a historian of gender, class and race in modern Britain. Her DPhil research, which was completed at Balliol College and the Faculty of History in 2022, focuses on the migration, settlement and labour experiences of working-class British-Pakistani women who settled in Middlesbrough and Oldham between 1962 and 2002. Aleena is the co-investigator of the community history project 'A Muslim History of Oxford', in collaboration with the national heritage organisation 'Everyday Muslim'. In addition, she is a postdoctoral research associate for the digital humanities project, 'Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830 to the Present' at the University of Bristol (2025).

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