Professor Jacqueline Leckie: Imagining Indian People, Places and Connections in Whanganui-a-Tara

When we think about Wellington’s Indian heritage, what comes to mind? Perhaps fruit shops, dairies, curry, hockey, or Diwali? The story behind these stereotypes is of course more complex than this — a rich and long history of Indian people that reaches back to the 19th century. This talk was based on Jacqueline’s research at the Turnbull Library and at other archives in Wellington, to document aspects of the history of Indian people in the capital. This history is embedded in certain streets and places of the city. Equally important are how Indian people also built their community — building their belonging to Wellington that was much more than physical structures. Her presentation also addressed economic, cultural, and other connections between Indian people and the wider public, and some of the connections of Indian-Wellington to India that can be also glimpsed through the visual record.

Jacqueline Leckie is a researcher and writer based in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She was a former J D Stout Research Fellow and is now an adjunct research fellow with the Stout Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, and conjoint associate professor in the School of Creative Industries and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is an honorary member of the NZ Indian Central Association, fellow of the NZ Indian Research Institute, an affiliate of the Centre for Global Migrations (Otago), and co-editor of the Journal of Pacific History. She has taught at the University of the South Pacific, Kenyatta University and University of Otago. Her books include Land of the Old Black Cloud: A Cultural History of Mental Depression in Aotearoa (2024), Invisible. New Zealand’s History of Excluding Kiwi-Indians (2021), Colonizing Madness: Asylum and Community in Fiji (2020), Indian Settlers: The Story of a New Zealand South Asian Community (2007), and editing Development in an Insecure and Gendered World (2009), and co-editing Migrant Cross-Cultural Encounters in Asia and the Pacific, Asians and the New Multiculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand; Localizing Asia in Aotearoa; Recentring Asia: Histories, Encounters, Identities  and Labour in the South Pacific.