Department of English

Abstract
This paper would argue how the present round of movements in parts of India behooves of a new theoretical understanding of the postcolonial political in Indian context. The issue of development has prominently figured in these movements which are mostly in nature an aggregated expression of deprived and discontented voices. Therefore the development question is right now allied with certain collateral issues like the reorientation of popular democracy, the reform within the present economic dispensations etc. Poor economic managements of the last forty years and the audacious reform in the early 90s have led to a new situation where the development discourse has to now abide by new paradigm of politics of the governed. The paper would cite the Nandigram and Haripur agitations in West Bengal as two referential cases to argue the central point.

Bourgeois parliamentarism has thus completed the cycle of its historical development and has arrived at the point of self-negation. Social Democracy, however, has taken up its post in the country and in parliament as, simultaneously, the cause and effect of this fate of the bourgeoisie. If parliamentarism has lost all significance for capitalist society, it is for the rising working class one of the most powerful and indispensable means of carrying on the class struggle. To save bourgeois parliamentarism from the bourgeoisie and use it against the bourgeoisie is one of Social Democracy's most urgent political tasks. (Luxemberg, 1904) Democracy today, I will insist, is not government of, by and for the people. Rather it should be seen as the politics of the governed (Chatterjee, 2004, 4) We must democratize Democracy, (Aristride, 2000, 36) In his book, The Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Ranciere has articulated the growing distrust of the liberal democratic model for its failure to serve the masses and it is now commonly held by many that democracy in its existing avatar serves only the wealthy and the powerful corporate

The arrival of neo-liberal capital in India under the guidance of a facilitating state and its
ever expanding hegemony in the civil society has resulted into newer areas of domination and
subalternisation. This paper basically deals with these emergent forms of subalternity and
antagonisms in contemporary India. Taking stock of the recent criticism of the project of
Subaltern Studies, the paper proposes for a „reformed‟ Subaltern Studies that addresses the
material conditionalities of subalternisation of the various disenfranchised groups for a
radical politics of counter narratives of resistance.

Author of two successive books from Sage, “Politics of Post-Civil Society” and “Maoism Democracy and Globalisation”, Ajay Gudavarthy has plugged the much needed gap of formulating new theoretical ideas and optics in an emerging field of social science studies in India. Almost three years back, he was shot to limelight with his provoking rebuttal of Partha Chatterjee’s theorization of Political Society which he found wanting in understanding the non-civil spaces of politics in India. This interview was partly a follow-up of that debate and partly his reflections on the future of Subaltern Studies project, Maoism and the recent spate of Hindutva politics in contemporary India. On behalf of the Kairos Team, Dhritiman Chakraborty took this interview in 2015.

Critical engagements like the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman, Rasasundari Devi, and the non-fictions by Kailashbasini Devi, Krishnabhabini Das, and other women writers in the second half of the nineteenth century contested the imagined idealization of the Hindu domesticity and conjugality as spaces of loveableness and spiritual commitment. They criticized coercion in child-marriages and the forceful injunctions of the Hindu scriptures on both married and widowed women. Such rhetoric of quasi empowerment needs to be disaggregated to perpetuate issues of 'double colonization,' 'dual-hold' in feminism in India. The question is whether there can be any grounds of women's agency in the Indian tradition. Eurocentric critiques are ill-equipped to politicize all modalities of a culture of social exclusion in Hindu imaginaries. Henceforth, as questions of equality, emancipation, and empowerment are fiercely debated in the public domain in contemporary India, we need to argue how immanent dissenting woman subjectivity can originate to counteract multiple patriarchies formed in Indian immediacies.