Mumbai, March 11 -- The 16th Neera Desai Memorial Lecture, originally scheduled to be held at SNDT Women's University, is set to take place outside the campus after the university cancelled the event citing "technical reasons." The lecture by noted historian and feminist scholar Uma Chakravarti will now be held on March 14 at Shivaji Mandir in Dadar. The programme is being organised jointly by the Maharashtra Stree Mukti Parishad and the civil society platform Mumbai 4 Peace. The memorial lecture had initially been planned in collaboration with SNDT Women's University. However, after the university withdrew from hosting the event, civil society groups stepped in to organise the programme independently. "The Maharashtra Stree Mukti Parishad was invited by SNDT to co-organise the Neera Desai Memorial Lecture by Uma Chakravarti. After the university cancelled the event, we decided to continue with it outside the campus. In collaboration with Mumbai 4 Peace, we are now organising the lecture in the city," educationist Chayanika Shah from Maharashtra Stree Mukti Parishad said. She added that this was the third instance in Mumbai where a lecture scheduled at an educational institution had been cancelled and later organised by civil society groups elsewhere. "Through such initiatives, we want to show that public lectures and discussions will continue despite attempts to curb academic debate and free expression," she said. Organisers pointed out that this wasn't the first such case. A lecture by actor Naseeruddin Shah on Urdu poetry, which was scheduled to be held at the University of Mumbai, was cancelled and later organised by Mumbai 4 Peace at Buddha Vihar near the university's Kalina campus. A memorial lecture dedicated to activist Stan Swamy was cancelled after objections were raised by the student organisation ABVP when the programme was planned at St Xavier's College. That lecture too was eventually held outside the campus. Sameer Wagle of the Mumbai 4 Peace platform said the group consists of volunteers from different fields who came together to promote communal harmony and protect both Mumbai's traditional pluralism and Constitutional values. "We all came together when we started seeing attempts to destroy Mumbai's communal harmony and brotherhood, and attempts to unreasonably censor free speech. When we came to know about the continuing cancellation of lectures without any reason, we started hosting these lectures so that the speakers are provided a platform and many citizens can freely listen to them, as our Constitution provides for," Wagle said....