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- Convenors:
-
Sanjukta Das Gupta
(Sapienza University of Rome)
Amit Prakash (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
- Location:
- Room 205
- Start time:
- 27 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
The panel explores the reappraisal of mainstream history and the alternative narratives of possible pasts and envisionable futures articulated by minorities, subaltern groups and radical dissenters among dominant communities in the context of liberalization and globalization in contemporary India.
Long Abstract:
The panel explores how diverse communities imagine their pasts and visualise their futures in the context of liberalisation and globalisation in contemporary India.
'Mainstream' histories have often been critiqued as being hegemonic rationalisations propagated by powerful elites. The 'challengers', on the other hand, attempt to appropriate and subvert such dominant legitimations of power. In India today, challenges to the dominant discourse are posed both by minorities and subaltern communities - including Adivasis and Dalits - who had for long been erased from or marginalised within the 'mainstream' discourse, as well as by dissenting interest groups - religious sects, for instance - within dominant communities themselves. Politically conscious sections among marginalised communities are engaged in constructing their own histories, leading to a reappraisal of mainstream history and its distinct methodology. Conversely, this exercise can also reinforce the canonical narratives and hegemonic versions of the past which these groups had sought to challenge in the first place. Moreover, since the roots of these two processes - that of normalisation of the mainstream through the tropes of nation-building and development, and its contestation by those marginalised - are interlinked, a search for alternative histories needs to interrogate the presumed normalcy of the 'mainstream'. Emphasising the link between history and development, the panel further explores the possibility of alternate models of dialogic and counter-hegemonic futures linked to new reconstructions of the past.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Sanjukta Das Gupta (Sapienza University of Rome)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses life histories and reminiscences of Santal adivasis which provide an alternate view of adivasi history, and traces how such understandings influenced subsequent interpretations of adivasi pasts.
Paper long abstract:
Situated between objective truth and personal narrative, memoirs and life-stories are a window to the lived experiences of the past and provide an understanding of the mental, emotional and cultural backgrounds and the social attitudes of both individuals and of the community or the wider society to which they belong. Marginalised subaltern groups of the colonial era, and particularly adivasi communities, have long remained absent in this kind of historical genre as they seem to have left behind few written records about themselves. Their idea of history has for long remained absent in the making of 'mainstream' history. A new assessment of how individual adivasis expressed their idea of the past, of the present and of their own identity will necessarily take into account the 'forgotten' texts which some of them did leave behind. This paper is an early attempt to throw light on the reminiscences of Chotrae Desmanjhi, a Christian Santal and an eye-witness of the rebellion of 1855. His memoirs provide, among other things, an alternate reading of the hul, its failure, and an account of the Santal migration to Assam. This may be considered as a different type of historical narrative, one that help us understand the author's fractured identity and sense of non-belonging brought about through displacement and the loss of homeland. The paper also analyses how such an alternate account influenced subsequent adivasi interpretations of their histories.
Sipra Mukherjee (West Bengal State University)
Paper short abstract:
Matua is a religious faith that began among the Chandals. This paper will study two areas of the Matua faith: one, their ritualized dance, and two, their ethic of work, to explore how the Matuas articulate their challenge to Brahminical Hinduism and concretize their imaginary of a new past and future.
Paper long abstract:
Matua is a religious faith in Bengal that began among the lower caste community of the Chandals (now the Namasudras). Over the years, the community has expanded its base and now includes supporters from other castes and tribes. Despite its roots in bhakti, the faith charted a somewhat different trajectory in its opposition to Hinduism and its radical emphasis on the secular world. In recent times, the Matua faith has drawn nearer to the bhakti tradition and Hinduism as it both appropriates and draws strength from the mainstream imaginaries.
This paper will explore how the Matuas concretized their imaginary of a new past and a new future by studying two areas of the Matua faith. The first is their dance, a ritualized breaking of the caste fetters that bind them - a practice that has remained a vibrant tradition among the community from the earliest days of the Matua faith (in the 19th century) to the present times. The second is their ethic of work, a rejection of sanyas for the ethic of the grihi, the householder, which has empowered them to widen their limited social horizons.
Together, the paper argues, the Matua faith has enabled the Namasudras to reject the dominant narrative of the Hindu society and allowed them to access the modernity made available by the colonial and then the postcolonial world.
Amit Prakash (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Paper short abstract:
Urban landscape offers a rich site to re-theorise processes of marginalisation, its contestation and sometimes, invention of alternatives. Proposed paper will therefore undertake a discursive analysis of policy and law that underpins marginalisation in the capital city of Delhi.
Paper long abstract:
Social science analysis of marginalisation has traditionally focussed on social communities such as castes and tribes. A significant proportion of such analysis if focussed on 'development' in its multifarious dimensions - the idea, processes, apparatus and outcomes - as the metanarrative simultaneously creating possibilities of hegemonisation, contestation, subversion and occasionally, reinvention.
However, in the contemporary processes and era of global expansion of capital, many of these contests have been centred on the city. Urban landscape thus offers a rich site to re-theorise processes of marginalisation, its contestation and sometimes, invention of alternatives. The proposed paper will therefore undertake a discursive analysis of policy and law that underpins marginalisation in the capital city of Delhi. Apart from using poverty (the target of 'development') as the lynchpin of analysis, the paper shall also interrogate its complex interface with social identities such as caste and tribe to demonstrate both, politics of emancipation and alternatives that sometimes are possible in the city; as also to underline the hegemony of extant law and policy to deny such possibilities. Representation and legitimacy deficit that is generated owing to peculiar constitutional location of the governance structures of the city compounds the problems as also creates a future vision in which dissent and plurality has an increasingly declining space.
The paper will utilise policy documents, legal and juridical articulations, policy implementation datasets and budgetary allocations to reconstruct and analyse the processes of poverty and marginalisation in the city of Delhi within a Foucaldian frame of disciplining and strategic subversion.
Harald Tambs-Lyche (Université de Picardie, Jules Verne, Amiens)
Paper short abstract:
The argument is that because of caste, subaltern communities in India are enabled to produce and represent their past well beyond what is feasible for subalterns in a less communitarian setting.
Paper long abstract:
Historicity, the ability and the willingness to explain the present by the past, may well be a human universal but it is enabled and framed by social organization. It is well known that patrilineal genealogies extend farther back than bilateral ones. It is also well known that high-status families tend to cherish the past in so far as it contributes prestige to the present. For the same reason, low-status families and those who have recently risen from a low position tend to minimize their past.
But when the whole community shares a past, the matter presents itself somewhat differently. The 'we' that underlies caste identities in India tends to extend far back, since it does not depend on the memory of single families. Here, the collective identity is to some extent abstracted from the actual network of social relations, preparing the way for myth or history to fix the collective past.
The argument here is that because of caste, subaltern communities in India are enabled to produce and represent their past well beyond what is feasible for subalterns in a less communitarian setting. This capacity to represent the past is shared, however, with other communities, including more powerful ones, implying that it is also harder for Indian subalterns to escape a stigmatized past.
Rakhee Kalita Moral (Cotton College (State University))
Paper short abstract:
In the late 1970s Assam in India's northeast saw a students’ protest against foreign influx.A parallel armed-struggle by ULFA demanded Assam's sovereignty from India. Thus,Assam's intellectual and political history elicited a discourse of dissent defining the marginality which Northeast India grapples with.
Paper long abstract:
Since the seventies of the last century, India's northeast witnessed various armed conflicts , across the region, creating a rebel country outside the national imaginary. Its strategic geopolitical location apart, this part of India remains underdeveloped and is perceived to be not only marginal but violent and "disturbed". In Assam the influx of foreigners from across the borders was a reason for heightened anxiety both demographically and culturally, and a mass civil uprising in the late seventies, led by students stirred a political and social unrest that snowballed into an armed struggle in the next two decades. ULFA, a self styled guerrilla group declared war against the Indian state and fashioned a movement aimed at retrieving Assam's precolonial grandeur and 'sovereignty'. The rhetoric of revolution and the overwhelmingly sub-nationalist sentiments spawned in the wake of these protests led to a climate of dissent in Assam in which a new discourse of alternative narratives proliferated, the subsequent disenchantment with ULFA notwithstanding. Literatures, pamphlets, political reportage and the media largely expressed a lineage of alienation from the nation-state. This period remains in the archival memory of the northeast a fractious moment of resistance and simultaneously, one in which relations with the Indian state got realigned. This paper seeks to understand the politics of rebellion and the historical significance that ULFA's conversations with the nation assume for posterity, even at this present juncture when it is in peace negotiations with the government.
Lipi Ghosh (University of Calcutta)
Paper short abstract:
This is a reappraisal of the mainstream majoritarian history by articulated Ahom historians who present new ideas of their own.
Paper long abstract:
The paper is going to be a study on interpretation of history by the Tai-Ahoms in Assam contravening the existing national narrative on their identity issues. It denotes a reappraisal of the mainstream majoritarian history and talks about thoughts of articulated Ahom historians who present new ideas of their own.
Mainstream historians of Assam ( Edward Gait, Eric Seidenfaden, B J Terwiel, Surya Kumar Bhuyan, Maheswar Neog, Satyendranath Sharma and S. Yasmin Saikia) often try to hegemonize and superimpose the caste Hindu Assamese identity on the Ahoms, the migrant dominant tribal group from other parts of Asia. The Ahom historians (Padmeswar Gogoi, Romesh Buragohain, J.N Phukhan and Girin Phukan) on the other hand poses strong challenge to these dominant discourse and propounds new historical discourse. Politically conscious sections among marginalised Tai- Ahom community are engaged in constructing their own political histories, leading to a reappraisal of mainstream history. Emphasising the link between history and development, the paper further explores the possibility of alternate models of counter-hegemonic futures linked to new reconstructions of the past. The paper asserts that at national level the Ahom discourse of new history can set a model paradigm of secularism, while internationally in context of the changing notions of cross cultural as well as intra Asian connectivities in the age of globalization, this new discourse of history may open up new meaning in India's Look East policy.
Anna Bochkovskaya (Institute of Asian and African Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the performative and iconic role of counter-scriptures recently adopted by several religious / pseudo-religious communities (deras) in India's Punjab for reassessing their role in the history of Sikhism.
Paper long abstract:
In 2010, the Punjab-based Dera Sachkhand Ballan announced a new religion, Ravidassia Dharam, in order to create a separate identity for contemporary followers of Sant Ravidas, a medieval saint whose hymns are part of the Sikhs' Guru Granth Sahib. In a year, the Ravidassia community launched the Amritbani Granth - own holy book that comprised some 240 hymns attributed to Ravidas. A copy of this scripture was installed in the Dera's bhavan (temple) in Jalandhar, Punjab, and in 2012, another copy was inaugurated in Shri Guru Ravidas Janam Sthan Mandir (birthplace of Guru Ravidas) in Varanasi, UP. Since then the Amritbani Granth has been displayed in many Ravidassia bhavans where its hymns are recited during daily worship.
Setting up an alternative scripture triggered an active discussion among Ravidassias both in India and overseas about their affiliation with Sikhism, and brought about a question of reassessing the historical role of Ravidassias in the Sikh community. The paper focuses on Amritbani Granth' s ritualization in Punjab and beyond through the analysis of the scripture's performative and iconic dimensions (Watts 2013) and explores how Sant Ravidas's ideas are currently used to envision the Ravidassia community's future.
Tanvi Chopra (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Paper short abstract:
Indian political economy has witnessed transformation from demands of redistributive to recognitive forms of justice. This paper aims at focusing on understanding alternative forms of justice constructed by marginalized Dalits.
Paper long abstract:
My doctoral work on 'The Dalit Quest for Recognition and Redistribution: The Politics of Deras in Punjab', aims to examine the development politics of the state which creates compulsions for the inclusion of one group and the exclusion of the other in the process of its redistributive justice which the modern liberal state has taken upon itself in the form of welfare state in order to retain its legitimacy which facilitates its governance.
In this context, I study caste politics in Punjab, a state in India where Dera politics constructs alternative forms of politics of recognition based on the acquired redistributive benefits of state policy.
I argue that inequality exists at differential levels, both economic as well as social. As my work focuses upon the (in) capacities of state policies to deliver social recognition as a policy response to the existing social inequality, how communities seek alternative form of justice through articulation of their own identity thereby creating a space for more just future for themselves becomes an intriguing issue that is to be examined.
Historically, Deras in Punjab are older than Sikh religion. However, their revival in such a way that their vision for future with less unjust society through the creation of separate Dalit identity in Punjab creates a challenge for status-quo.
The use of poetry, teachings and legends about the life of Ravidas in order to assert equal rights and dignity reflects the construction of identity for the alternative forms of justice to attain citizenship in essence.