Mohinder Singh - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
book by Mohinder Singh
Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the vocabulary of civility and civilization is very... more At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the vocabulary of civility and civilization is very much at the forefront of political debate. Most of these debates proceed as if the meaning of these words were self-evident. This is where Civilizing Emotions intervenes, tracing the history of the concepts of civility and civilization and thus adding a level of self-reflexivity to the present debates. Unlike previous histories, Civilizing Emotions takes a global perspective, highlighting the roles of civility and civilization in the creation of a new and hierarchized global order in the era of high imperialism and its entanglements with the developments in a number of well-chosen European and Asian countries.
Emotions were at the core of the practices linked to the creation of a new global order in the nineteenth century. Civilizing Emotions explores why and how emotions were an asset in civilizing peoples and societies - their control and management, but also their creation and their ascription to different societies and social groups. The study is a contribution to the history of emotions, to global history, and to the history of concepts, three rapidly developing and innovative research areas which are here being brought together for the first time.
Authors: Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordheim, Orit Bashkin, Christian Bailey, Oleg Benesch, Jan Ifversen, Mana Kia, Rochona Majumdar, Angelika C. Messner, Myoung-kyu Park, Emmanuelle Saada, Mohinder Singh, and Einar Wigen
Papers by Mohinder Singh
This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) 'seditio... more This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) 'sedition' case of February 2016, focusing particularly on its media representations. It shows how the case was, from its outset, embroiled in the politics of representation, with questions of truth and lies receding into the background to give way to clashes of opinionhowever unfounded they may have been in information, fact or truthbroadly reflecting the nature of the public sphere in these 'post-truth' times. Further, it analyses how the protests at JNU following the event sought to project an image of the university countering right-wing representations, while also enriching debates on nationalism, democracy, dissent and freedom of speech. It concludes by showing how the hostile representations of JNU fitted well with overall politics, combining the hyper-nationalism and neoliberalism, promoted by the current regime led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the right-wing Hindu nationalist and supremacist paramilitary volunteer organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, 2025
This paper explores the anxiety about an impending crisis of Indian national identity expressed i... more This paper explores the anxiety about an impending crisis of Indian national identity expressed in the contest over the phrase 'the idea of India' in public and political spheres in 21st century Indian politics. The paper limits itself to exploring the sense of the crisis and the anxiety surrounding it as expressed by public intellectuals and political formations, in the use of the phrase idea of India. Within this limit, the paper is further focused on exploring the cultural and representational dimension of Indian national identity and its sense of unity. The introduction plots contemporary political developments and anxieties that have animated the contest over the idea of India, followed by a section that maps conceptual issues by understanding the different uses this phrase has been put to in the last two decades. The next section summarizes the major paradigms of Indian identity and unity that have emerged in Indian politics in the last hundred years and have been influential. The final section explores the uses of the idea of India in contemporary Indian politics by focusing on the recent public articulations of the phrase by a leading politician Rahul Gandhi.
India's Collaboration with Latin America as Reflected in Co-authored Papers
Interdisziplinäre Zeitschrift für Südasienforschung, 2022
Several movements for religious and social reform emerged among the religious communities in 19 t... more Several movements for religious and social reform emerged among the religious communities in 19 th century India as varied responses to the colonial 'civilizing mission'. The work of reform among the Hindus and Muslims involved both the defence of their respective religious traditions and simultaneous critiques of established religious practices and institutions seen as corrupt or inauthentic. Both Hindus and Muslims inherited rich traditions of reason, reasoning and rational argumentation as well as of internal religious innovation and reforms. What is new about the 19 th century reformist discourses, is the imbrication of these concepts with the Western conceptions of reason and science. The public sphere that emerged in this wake involved diverse forms of polemics and contests within religious traditions (i.e., between the orthodox and the reformers within a tradition) and between the religious traditions. The colonial state protected religious criticism, subject to public peace and order. However, public order frequently became a concern for the state as both these dimensions of religious controversies tended to generate affects-hurt feelings, passions, public enthusiasm-often leading to violence. A large number of court cases were also filed as a consequence. The public sphere of the religious controversies was also exposed to the global circulation of concepts, images and rhetorical figures. This article attempts to explore the rational and affective dimensions of the religious controversies in the early 20 th century India by focusing on an important document related to the history of the reformist organisation Arya Samaj relevant for this theme.
Exceptionalising democratic dissent: a study of the JNU event and its representations
Postcolonial Studies, 2019
ABSTRACT This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)... more ABSTRACT This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) ‘sedition’ case of February 2016, focusing particularly on its media representations. It shows how the case was, from its outset, embroiled in the politics of representation, with questions of truth and lies receding into the background to give way to clashes of opinion – however unfounded they may have been in information, fact or truth – broadly reflecting the nature of the public sphere in these ‘post-truth’ times. Further, it analyses how the protests at JNU following the event sought to project an image of the university countering right-wing representations, while also enriching debates on nationalism, democracy, dissent and freedom of speech. It concludes by showing how the hostile representations of JNU fitted well with overall politics, combining the hyper-nationalism and neoliberalism, promoted by the current regime led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the right-wing Hindu nationalist and supremacist paramilitary volunteer organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Spectres of the West
Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe, 2015
Temporalization of Concepts: Reflections on the Concept of Unnati (Progress) in Hindi (1870–1900)
Contributions to the History of Concepts, 2012
This article analyzes the historical semantics of the concept of unnati in the nationalist discou... more This article analyzes the historical semantics of the concept of unnati in the nationalist discourse in Hindi between 1870 and 1900. The article first outlines the basic features of the Enlightenment concept of progress using Koselleck's analysis. It then goes on to discuss the place of the concept of progress in the colonial ideology of a “civilizing mission,“ and concludes by taking up the analysis of the usage of the term unnati in the nationalist discourse in North India.
Civilizing Emotions, 2015
This work is a contribution to the growing Oxford University Press series, Emotions in History. E... more This work is a contribution to the growing Oxford University Press series, Emotions in History. Emotions are clearly involved in how civility and civilization are constructed in late nineteenth-to early twentieth-century world cultures during the age of high imperialism in the investigations produced by these authors. However, the scholarship that informs these essays in the main stems not from the history of emotions so much as the history of concepts, a form of intellectual history particularly strong in the German academic tradition. This takes concepts -in this case civility and civilization -as the subject of investigation, explored through language and semantic fields in texts that, here, primarily concern the genres of dictionaries, encyclopedias, media debates and literature. As Jan Ifverson emphasizes in his Afterword, a key contribution of this collaborative project is its interest in going beyond national-level investigations to the transnational and its global entanglements. This is a particular challenge in a field that is grounded in linguistic specificities but which is handled here through attention to transfers, transmissions and translations of concepts between cultures.
Postcolonial Studies, 2019
This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) ‘seditio... more This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) ‘sedition’ case of February 2016, focusing particularly on its media representations. It shows how the case was, from its outset, embroiled in the politics of representation, with questions of truth and lies receding into the background to give way to clashes of opinion – however unfounded they may have been in information, fact or truth – broadly reflecting the nature of the public sphere in these ‘post-truth’ times. Further, it analyses how the protests at JNU following the event sought to project an image of the university countering right-wing representations, while also enriching debates on nationalism, democracy, dissent and freedom of speech. It concludes by showing how the hostile representations of JNU fitted well with overall politics, combining the hyper-nationalism and neoliberalism, promoted by the current regime led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the right-wing Hindu nationalist and supremacist paramilitary volunteer organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Rabindranath Tagore's reflections on the concepts and practices of civilisation, nationalism, and... more Rabindranath Tagore's reflections on the concepts and practices of civilisation, nationalism, and community are directly concerned with the nature of modern political power and its underlying assumptions about human life. This article interprets these reflections by reading them along with and in the light of his philosophical anthropology as articulated in a variety of philosophical essays, focusing closely on The Religion of Man. It concludes by underscoring the contemporary import of these reflections as a philosophical resource for thinking about possibilities of human communities that go beyond the way the dominant tendency in political power tends to capture human life under its multiple regimes.
This paper is based on a reading and an interpretation of Swami Shraddhanand’s Hindi autobiograph... more This paper is based on a reading and an interpretation of Swami
Shraddhanand’s Hindi autobiography, published in 1924. In it,
Shraddhanand centrally narrates the story of his conversion to the
Arya Samaj and his self-transformation in the second half of the
nineteenth century. Through a close reading of the conceptual
terminology embedded in the text, the paper attempts to show that
the conversion being narrated here cannot be understood by
referring to the category of religion alone, and that the identity that
the protagonist discovers for himself—his new Arya identity—is a
composite civilisational-religious identity that involves transformed
ideas of religion and religiosity.
Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the vocabulary of civility and civilization is very... more At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the vocabulary of civility and civilization is very much at the forefront of political debate. Most of these debates proceed as if the meaning of these words were self-evident. This is where Civilizing Emotions intervenes, tracing the history of the concepts of civility and civilization and thus adding a level of self-reflexivity to the present debates. Unlike previous histories, Civilizing Emotions takes a global perspective, highlighting the roles of civility and civilization in the creation of a new and hierarchized global order in the era of high imperialism and its entanglements with the developments in a number of well-chosen European and Asian countries.
Emotions were at the core of the practices linked to the creation of a new global order in the nineteenth century. Civilizing Emotions explores why and how emotions were an asset in civilizing peoples and societies - their control and management, but also their creation and their ascription to different societies and social groups. The study is a contribution to the history of emotions, to global history, and to the history of concepts, three rapidly developing and innovative research areas which are here being brought together for the first time.
Authors: Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordheim, Orit Bashkin, Christian Bailey, Oleg Benesch, Jan Ifversen, Mana Kia, Rochona Majumdar, Angelika C. Messner, Myoung-kyu Park, Emmanuelle Saada, Mohinder Singh, and Einar Wigen
This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) 'seditio... more This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) 'sedition' case of February 2016, focusing particularly on its media representations. It shows how the case was, from its outset, embroiled in the politics of representation, with questions of truth and lies receding into the background to give way to clashes of opinionhowever unfounded they may have been in information, fact or truthbroadly reflecting the nature of the public sphere in these 'post-truth' times. Further, it analyses how the protests at JNU following the event sought to project an image of the university countering right-wing representations, while also enriching debates on nationalism, democracy, dissent and freedom of speech. It concludes by showing how the hostile representations of JNU fitted well with overall politics, combining the hyper-nationalism and neoliberalism, promoted by the current regime led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the right-wing Hindu nationalist and supremacist paramilitary volunteer organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, 2025
This paper explores the anxiety about an impending crisis of Indian national identity expressed i... more This paper explores the anxiety about an impending crisis of Indian national identity expressed in the contest over the phrase 'the idea of India' in public and political spheres in 21st century Indian politics. The paper limits itself to exploring the sense of the crisis and the anxiety surrounding it as expressed by public intellectuals and political formations, in the use of the phrase idea of India. Within this limit, the paper is further focused on exploring the cultural and representational dimension of Indian national identity and its sense of unity. The introduction plots contemporary political developments and anxieties that have animated the contest over the idea of India, followed by a section that maps conceptual issues by understanding the different uses this phrase has been put to in the last two decades. The next section summarizes the major paradigms of Indian identity and unity that have emerged in Indian politics in the last hundred years and have been influential. The final section explores the uses of the idea of India in contemporary Indian politics by focusing on the recent public articulations of the phrase by a leading politician Rahul Gandhi.
India's Collaboration with Latin America as Reflected in Co-authored Papers
Interdisziplinäre Zeitschrift für Südasienforschung, 2022
Several movements for religious and social reform emerged among the religious communities in 19 t... more Several movements for religious and social reform emerged among the religious communities in 19 th century India as varied responses to the colonial 'civilizing mission'. The work of reform among the Hindus and Muslims involved both the defence of their respective religious traditions and simultaneous critiques of established religious practices and institutions seen as corrupt or inauthentic. Both Hindus and Muslims inherited rich traditions of reason, reasoning and rational argumentation as well as of internal religious innovation and reforms. What is new about the 19 th century reformist discourses, is the imbrication of these concepts with the Western conceptions of reason and science. The public sphere that emerged in this wake involved diverse forms of polemics and contests within religious traditions (i.e., between the orthodox and the reformers within a tradition) and between the religious traditions. The colonial state protected religious criticism, subject to public peace and order. However, public order frequently became a concern for the state as both these dimensions of religious controversies tended to generate affects-hurt feelings, passions, public enthusiasm-often leading to violence. A large number of court cases were also filed as a consequence. The public sphere of the religious controversies was also exposed to the global circulation of concepts, images and rhetorical figures. This article attempts to explore the rational and affective dimensions of the religious controversies in the early 20 th century India by focusing on an important document related to the history of the reformist organisation Arya Samaj relevant for this theme.
Exceptionalising democratic dissent: a study of the JNU event and its representations
Postcolonial Studies, 2019
ABSTRACT This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)... more ABSTRACT This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) ‘sedition’ case of February 2016, focusing particularly on its media representations. It shows how the case was, from its outset, embroiled in the politics of representation, with questions of truth and lies receding into the background to give way to clashes of opinion – however unfounded they may have been in information, fact or truth – broadly reflecting the nature of the public sphere in these ‘post-truth’ times. Further, it analyses how the protests at JNU following the event sought to project an image of the university countering right-wing representations, while also enriching debates on nationalism, democracy, dissent and freedom of speech. It concludes by showing how the hostile representations of JNU fitted well with overall politics, combining the hyper-nationalism and neoliberalism, promoted by the current regime led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the right-wing Hindu nationalist and supremacist paramilitary volunteer organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Spectres of the West
Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe, 2015
Temporalization of Concepts: Reflections on the Concept of Unnati (Progress) in Hindi (1870–1900)
Contributions to the History of Concepts, 2012
This article analyzes the historical semantics of the concept of unnati in the nationalist discou... more This article analyzes the historical semantics of the concept of unnati in the nationalist discourse in Hindi between 1870 and 1900. The article first outlines the basic features of the Enlightenment concept of progress using Koselleck's analysis. It then goes on to discuss the place of the concept of progress in the colonial ideology of a “civilizing mission,“ and concludes by taking up the analysis of the usage of the term unnati in the nationalist discourse in North India.
Civilizing Emotions, 2015
This work is a contribution to the growing Oxford University Press series, Emotions in History. E... more This work is a contribution to the growing Oxford University Press series, Emotions in History. Emotions are clearly involved in how civility and civilization are constructed in late nineteenth-to early twentieth-century world cultures during the age of high imperialism in the investigations produced by these authors. However, the scholarship that informs these essays in the main stems not from the history of emotions so much as the history of concepts, a form of intellectual history particularly strong in the German academic tradition. This takes concepts -in this case civility and civilization -as the subject of investigation, explored through language and semantic fields in texts that, here, primarily concern the genres of dictionaries, encyclopedias, media debates and literature. As Jan Ifverson emphasizes in his Afterword, a key contribution of this collaborative project is its interest in going beyond national-level investigations to the transnational and its global entanglements. This is a particular challenge in a field that is grounded in linguistic specificities but which is handled here through attention to transfers, transmissions and translations of concepts between cultures.
Postcolonial Studies, 2019
This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) ‘seditio... more This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) ‘sedition’ case of February 2016, focusing particularly on its media representations. It shows how the case was, from its outset, embroiled in the politics of representation, with questions of truth and lies receding into the background to give way to clashes of opinion – however unfounded they may have been in information, fact or truth – broadly reflecting the nature of the public sphere in these ‘post-truth’ times. Further, it analyses how the protests at JNU following the event sought to project an image of the university countering right-wing representations, while also enriching debates on nationalism, democracy, dissent and freedom of speech. It concludes by showing how the hostile representations of JNU fitted well with overall politics, combining the hyper-nationalism and neoliberalism, promoted by the current regime led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the right-wing Hindu nationalist and supremacist paramilitary volunteer organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Rabindranath Tagore's reflections on the concepts and practices of civilisation, nationalism, and... more Rabindranath Tagore's reflections on the concepts and practices of civilisation, nationalism, and community are directly concerned with the nature of modern political power and its underlying assumptions about human life. This article interprets these reflections by reading them along with and in the light of his philosophical anthropology as articulated in a variety of philosophical essays, focusing closely on The Religion of Man. It concludes by underscoring the contemporary import of these reflections as a philosophical resource for thinking about possibilities of human communities that go beyond the way the dominant tendency in political power tends to capture human life under its multiple regimes.
This paper is based on a reading and an interpretation of Swami Shraddhanand’s Hindi autobiograph... more This paper is based on a reading and an interpretation of Swami
Shraddhanand’s Hindi autobiography, published in 1924. In it,
Shraddhanand centrally narrates the story of his conversion to the
Arya Samaj and his self-transformation in the second half of the
nineteenth century. Through a close reading of the conceptual
terminology embedded in the text, the paper attempts to show that
the conversion being narrated here cannot be understood by
referring to the category of religion alone, and that the identity that
the protagonist discovers for himself—his new Arya identity—is a
composite civilisational-religious identity that involves transformed
ideas of religion and religiosity.