John Malcolm, who has recently published a biography of his namesake and kinsman, Sir John Malcolm (1769-1833) (Malcolm – Soldier, Diplomat, Ideologue of British India), will be discussing Sir John’s role as envoy to Persia and writer of the History of Persia. John Malcolm was the representative of Shell in Iran 1967-71 and therefore has a very good understanding of Iran.  For an outline of his book, see below: ‘MALCOLM – SOLDIER, DIPLOMAT, IDEOLOGUE OF BRITISH INDIA’ The Life of Sir John Malcolm (1769 – 1833) THEMES OF THE BOOK:

• Malcolm as a man. Son of an impoverished Scottish tenant farmer (one of 17 siblings), who left school, family and country at the age of thirteen, and achieved distinction in a distant continent as a soldier, diplomat, administrator and scholar. A dashing, ebullient and generous character, largely self-educated. In these days of narrow credentialism, a quintessential all-rounder.
• Indian History. The current perception of the British Raj tends to be of Curzon, Kipling, E. M. Forster, memsahibs and the Freedom struggle; of a complacent and apparently immovavble imperial edifice being outmanoeuvred by the non-violent tactics of the saintly Mahatma Gandhi; and before that, of evangelically minded British generals crushing brave but pathetic Indian resistance with superior weaponry. But in Malcolm’s day Indo-British relationships were very different.
• The Governance of India. Between 1783 and 1833 a fierce political debate (in which Malcolm played a leading part) raged in British governing circles about how India was to be governed. This debate can be described in terms of ‘imperialism’. But it still has relevance to-day, in the shape of the struggle between super power hegemony (via the UN, the IMF etc) and national governments
• The East India Company was one of the world’s first multinational corporations. The issues its management faced have many parallels to-day: for instance, the tensions between a head office and a distant ‘man on the spot’ .
• Persia and the Great Game. Malcolm was one of the earliest players in the Great Game between Britain and Russia in Persia and Central Asia.

SIR JOHN MALCOLM’S LIFE         Achievements

• Soldier: a professional soldier rising to Major-General, who campaigned with Wellington in India (and arguably became his best friend); and who later led EIC troops to victory over the Mahratta Chief Holkar in 1817.
• Diplomat: deservedly earning the cry “Send Malcolm” for his troubleshooting abilities and his leadership of three missions to Persia.
• Administrator: One of a trio of Scotsmen (the others being Elphinstone and Munro) who worked out a philosophical basis for British rule in western India, so that when hegemony was achieved in 1818, they had the vision to:
• leave things largely as they were in ‘British’ India; simply enforcing existing laws;
• refrain from interference in the internal governance of ‘Native’ States
• prohibit European colonisation
• promote Indians to senior levels in EIC administration
• recognise that the ‘moral mandate’ for British rule in India was temporary; that its very success would eventually be its undoing

In short, Malcolm can realistically be called an ‘Ideologue’ of British India, whose ideas ‘were forgotten too soon and remembered too late’.

• Scholar: author of nine books, including The History of Persia, the first in a European language from Persian sources, mostly gathered from personal observation and local dialogue.

Character

• Courageous: leaving school, family and country at 13; never shrinking from a challenge
• All rounder: fighting soldier, sportsman, diplomat, administrator, scholar, linguist and poet;
• Liberal: modern attitudes to Indian and Persian affairs; interest in and respect for local culture, advocate of ‘Native’ education (even female education!); absence of arrogance or racial prejudice.
• Gift for friendship: with all sorts of people – the grandest (Wellington, Fath Ali Shah, Peshwah Baji Rao, Marquess Wellesley); the most learned (Mackintosh, Humboldt, Whewell and Walter Scott) ; the humblest Indian or Persian peasant; and fellow travellers everywhere.
• Faults – over-ambitious, vain, ‘a great and loud talker’, getting into fights with “head office” – but also over-generous, too trusting, writer of bad poetry;
• Zest for life – nicknamed “Boy Malcolm” for his youthful exuberance even in middle age.

Recognition

• Recognised in his lifetime and shortly after (GCB, Persian Order of Lion and Sun specially created for him by Fath Ali Shah, statues in Westminster Abbey and Bombay, monument at Langholm) but now better remembered in India, and to some extent Persia, than in Britain.

Roxana Vilk delivers a personal account of making theatre and film in Iran. Roxana originally trained in theatre at the Lecoq School in Paris and then went on to receive a Masters in Fine Art specialising in Film from the Edinburgh College of Art. She frequently works cross art form. She has made theatre and films across the world, most recently  in Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Bosnia Herzegovina, France and Norway. Her film ‘Tehran Backyard’ was nominated for a Royal Television Award, and won best film at the Next Frame film festival in the US. She co-wrote the drama feature film ‘Trouble Sleeping’ which won a Scottish BAFTA award. In 2013 Roxana directed a large scale site specific promenade performance with a cast of over 80 performers and musicians through the Botanical Gardens of Edinburgh, based on the 11th Century Persian text of Farid Al Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds. In 2012 she directed and produced a six part TV series called ‘Poets of Protest’ for Al Jazeera English Artscape series, looking at the Arab spring through the eyes of poets from the region and creating experimental filmic interpretations of their words. Most recently she was commissioned by Reel Festivals, British Council and Literature without Frontiers to create experimental short films in response to the words of Iraqi poets, filmed in Iraq in 2013. In 2014 she made a new film for the BBC called Iranian Enough? exploring cultural identity through a personal story. She was commissioned by the Commonwealth Year of Culture to make 8 artistic films for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. She is singer and co-producer with the band GOL. In 2014 she was nominated for a Margaret Tait Award for her artistic work. Roxana is represented by Jo Probitts Arts Management. For more information please go to www.roxanavilk.com

The most elaborate and luxurious manuscript of the Ilkhanid period is a fourteenth-century copy (now dispersed) of the Shahnama (Book of Kings), medic known today as the Great Mongol Shahnama. It exists today in the form of 57 illustrations and several text pages scattered among public and private collections. Extensive study of the manuscript has revealed that the original was probably two volumes of about 280 large folios and 190 illustrations. In the early twentieth century, denture Paris dealer Georges Demotte took the manuscript apart, splitting some folios with illustrations on both sides and selling the resulting two leaves individually. He commissioned new text pages to paste on the backs of the undamaged split leaves; when these were damaged, the salvaged image was pasted onto a newly commissioned folio. As a result, some paintings are unrelated to the accompanying text, while others have incomplete text. The pages of the Great Mongol Shahnama are large in format and most of the space is often entirely painted. The figures possess a monumental quality, and the use of such devices as the extension of trees and battle standards beyond the picture frame and the truncation of human and animal figures imparts a sense of barely contained energy. The frequent depiction of figures seen from behind pulls the viewer into the picture space, enhancing the drama. The innovative Ilkhanid artists combined the traditional style of Persian painting with elements borrowed from other traditions—costumes, rocks, trees, and clouds from Chinese art; compositions from Western painting—to produce a unique and unparalleled visual expression. The Shahnama, with its rich detailing of the largely lost material culture of the Mongol court, presents a view of the contemporary Ilkhanid world, transforming a popular text into a splendid visual document of the period. Robert Hillenbrand has spent many years tracing the dispersed folios in order to bring them together to produce a facsimile of the original.

Professor Annabelle Sreberny of SOAS will be discussing the development of the BBC Persian Service from its founding in World War II up to 2009. Her talk will be based on her recent book Persian Service – The BBC and British Interests in Iran. Rumour and speculation in Iran have been rife for generations that the BBC has had a hand in every political upheaval in the country. In this vein the BBC has become a notable element in the complex and tortured narrative of Anglo-Iranian relations. The BBC Persian Service was initially developed in 1940 to prepare and broadcast British war-time propaganda. And it has since been seen by many in Iran as an integral part of British policy-making in the region. Thirty years ago, the Shah of Iran regarded the BBC Persian Service radio as his ‘enemy number one’ and held it responsible for promoting the revolution of 1979. Only a couple decades earlier, the BBC Persian Service was widely accused for having been complicit in the CIA-led 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Musaddiq. And a decade earlier, the BBC Persian Service was strongly linked to the British-planned removal of Reza Shah in 1941. The BBC Persian service has frequently been perceived as an entity which was not simply a vehicle to record the changes occurring in Iran and throughout the Middle East, but rather an active agent of change. In this book, Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh track the history of the BBC Persian Service, critically analysing both the assumptions that the BBC is a standard bearer for objective reporting and representations of it as a simple tool of Western interests. Also examining the history of relations between the Foreign Office and the BBC Persian Service, they demonstrate that these have never been pre-defined or rigid. Instead, they explore how both institutions have moved from an interest in what can crudely be called state-orchestrated ‘propaganda’ to a more subtle advocacy of fair and balanced journalism as the best agent of British values and influence.

Persian kingship and architecture: strategies of power from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis. Sussan Babaie will be introducing this groundbreaking book that includes scholarly views from archaeology and architectural history and covers important periods in the long history of Iran. Since the Shah went into exile and the Islamic Republic was established in 1979, unhealthy the very idea of monarchy in Iran has become contentious but history tells us that it had served, ailment for millennia, as a unifying cultural force despite shifting political and religious allegiances. The lecture goes on to take Isfahan as a case study to discuss the pivotal role played by the institution of kingship in articulating an abstract notion of Iran since antiquity.

Dr Dominic Brookshaw of Oxford University will lecture on Qajar Women in Photography and Writing. A Persian dinner will then be provided by Mohsen Restaurant. This event will be held at St Columba’s Church Hall, ed Pont Street, diagnosis SW1X 0BD, starting promptly at 7pm. Limited seating. Entry by prepaid ticket only @ £35 each, obtainable from the office until 9th December unless sold out, or via PayPal using the link below

Number of tickets

1 £35.00 GBP 2 £70.00 GBP 3 £105.00 GBP 4 £140.00 GBP 5 £175.00 GBP 6 £210.00 GBP 7 £245.00 GBP 8 £280.00 GBP 9 £315.00 GBP 10 £350.00 GBP

Iran’s ‘Sacred Defence’ and the Politics of Visual Remembrance Dr Shafaie will take us on a journey from the official discourse of the Iran-Iraq War to the more recent popular war narratives belonging to the Iranian civil society. She will discuss how Iranian leaders perceived and presented the Iran-Iraq War as a ‘Sacred Defence’ and what discursive strategies they used in the building of the Islamic nation-state. She will then show how the Iranian society embarked on making a new generation of war narratives that were multi-vocal and pluralistic in contrast with the monologic war discourse that was engineered by the state. She will illustrate her talk by discussing various vehicles of public visual remembrance such as bank notes, postal stamps, street murals, museums, and films. Dr Shirin Shafaie studied philosophy, and philosophy of art in Tehran, and Middle East Politics, and Film and TV in London. She completed her doctoral research on ‘Contemporary Iranian War Narratives: A Dialectical Discourse Analysis’ at SOAS, University of London, where she is currently teaching. She also holds a post-doctoral position at the Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies in Oxford where she works on inter-textual readings of shared sacred narratives. Her research interests are narrative theory, critical war studies, and faith-based diplomacy. She has worked extensively with victims of chemical weapons and war-related mental illness and has been involved in a number of projects at the Tehran Peace Museum and other civil-society movements for inter-religious peace and dialogue. Besides her research activities, Dr Shafaie is the Director of Visual Academics Ltd. that provides professional filmmaking services to universities.

Beyond the chador: Iranian dress for women.