India studies

Cultures of Memory in South Asia reconfigures European representations of India as a paradigmatic extension of a classical reading, which posits the relation between text and context in a determined way. It explores the South Asian cultural response to European “textual” inheritances. The main argument of this work is that the reflective and generative nodes of Indian cultural formations are located in the configurations of memory, the body and idiom (verbal and visual), where the body or the body complex becomes the performative effect and medium of articulated memories. This work advances its arguments by engaging with mnemocultures—cultures of memory—that survive and proliferate in speech and gesture. Drawing on Sanskrit and Telugu reflective sources, this work emphasizes the need to engage with cultural memory and the compositional modes of Indian reflective traditions. This important and original work focuses on the ruptured and stigmatised resources of heterogeneous Indian traditions and calls for critical humanities that move beyond the colonially configured received traditions. Cultures of Memory suggests the possibilities of transcultural critical humanities research and teaching initiatives from the Indian context in today’s academy.

When we talk about the caste system today, among other things, we talk about the wily, crafty, and ostentatious Brahmins who founded and maintained a set of self-serving rules that effectively took the form of the caste system. How do social scientists know about these Brahmins? As a set of new scholars are demonstrating today, the ancient Indian texts – such as the Vedas or the Mahabharata – do not talk about the caste system or the domineering priestly class of Brahmins. These texts do not even exhibit an impulse to put into place a system that even remotely resembles the so-called caste system. From where does this idea of the Brahmin emerge then? This paper sifts through the earliest available Islamic writings on India, from the early 8th century to Al-Biruni’stime, to chart a genealogy of the figure of the law-making, crafty Brahmin that emerged in 11th-century Muslim writings.

This article explains why elite classes participate in religiously motivated peasant rebellions. This question is important because, although elite resources are required to overcome collective action barriers, extant research ignores why elites collaborate in religiously motivated peasant rebellions. The article compares the Moplah Rebellion in colonial India, the Cristero Rebellion in revolutionary Mexico, and the Chimurenga Rebellion in white-controlled Zimbabwe to test three common explanations for elite participation: low inequality between elites and peasants; moderate political repression or opportunity; and shared religious organizations with the peasantry. The findings demonstrate that elite cooperation is critically contingent on shared religion because it creates cross-class ideologies and lowers the costs of participation by elites. However, the effects of inequality of wealth and political opportunities are inconclusive. By doing so, the article introduces a theory of elite participation that can be tested and refined to understand ongoing religiously motivated rebellions in agrarian societies as disparate as Pakistan, Nigeria, and the Philippines.

In this thesis I compare the social history of movements against hydropower projects in two states of India, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, from 1921 to 2004 in three phases. The specific aim of this project is to demonstrate the shifting notion of subaltern political subjectivity and `state-formation' in postcolonial India. Here I argue that the subalterns played significant causal and constitutive roles in transforming the structure of postcolonial Indian state in a more democratic direction and in that process considerably changed their political discourses, practices and strategies. The two extended historical cases of movement against large dams illustrated in this thesis mark the different types of subaltern politics that emerged in postcolonial India.

Chapter 1. Introduction: Through the Postcolonial Abyss.- Part I: Signatures of Memory.- Chapter 2. Configurations of Memory and the Work of Difference.- Chapter 3. Futures of the Past: Mnemocultures and the Question of Inheritance.- Part II: Mnemotexts of Reflection.- Chapter 4. Learning in the Double Bind: Mnemotextual Inquiries and Action Knowledge.- Chapter 5. Fables of Identity and Contingencies of Certainty: Disarticulations of the Panchatantra.- Chapter 6. Tanunapat: Kalos, Philos and the Vestiges of Trace.- Part III: Embodiments of Response.- Chapter 7. The Mahabharata Contretemps: Temporality, Finitude and the Modes of Being in the Itihasa.- Chapter 8. Responsive Receptions: The Question of Translation beyond the Accursed Zone.- Chapter 9. Listening to the Text looms of Vemana: Memory, History and the Archives of Betrayal.- Chapter 10. Close Ups: Approaching Critical Humanities.