CORDIAL COLD WAR

Anandita Bajpai is currently a Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. From 2017 to 2020, she was a lecturer at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. She has been a postdoctoral fellow in the Modern India in German Archives, 1706–1989 (MIDA) Project funded by the German Research Council since 2014. She pursued her PhD at Leipzig Universität, Germany, and holds an MA degree in Global Studies, pursued at the Universities of Leipzig and Vienna (2006–2008). Her previous research has focused on political rhetoric in India. She is the author of Speaking the Nation: The Oratorical Making of Secular, Neo-liberal India (2018). She is also the editor (with Dr Heike Liebau) of the Archival Reflexicon, an open-access bilingual archival guide, which is a platform for theoretical and conceptual reflections on archival architectures/organizing logics as well as thematic contributions on India-related holdings of specific German archives. See online: https://www.projekt-mida.de/rechercheportal/reflexicon/ Her current project focuses on cultural entanglements between India and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In this direction, she is pursuing research on overlapping trajectories of the East German International Radio broadcaster, Radio Berlin International, and the Bonn-based radio station from the Federal Republic of Germany, Deutsche Welle. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in India and Germany, especially with journalists from the two radio stations and their respective listeners’ clubs in India. She is the director of a documentary film on Radio Berlin International (its journalists based in present-day Germany and its listeners in Madhepura, Bihar, India) titled The Sound of Friendship: Warm Wavelengths in a Cold, Cold War? The trailer can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4qLiM_jflw Bajpai’s Habilitationsprojekt (German professorial exam) on the Cold War looks at entanglements between India and the GDR by tracing the histories of friendship societies, theatrical circuits, comic books, miniature books, souvenirs and statues as material sites of engagement. Broadly, Bajpai’s interests include the Cold War, sonic/acoustic histories and radio as a medium, international film and youth festivals as sites of Afro-Asian entanglements, modern Indian history (particularly, Partition and the Nehruvian era) and political oratory of Indian prime ministers. Besides her own research, she continues to supervise BA and MA theses at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.