JANAKI NAIR | Jawaharlal Nehru University (original) (raw)
Papers by JANAKI NAIR
Gender <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> History, 1999
Studies in History, Jul 31, 2016
Review of development and change, Dec 1, 1997
Studies in History, Aug 1, 1999
History Workshop Journal, 2016
THINKING INDIAN PUBLIC HISTORY What prevents the ‘fact-respecting, secular historian’ in India fr... more THINKING INDIAN PUBLIC HISTORY What prevents the ‘fact-respecting, secular historian’ in India from gaining the attention of the public while wanting to adjudicate on disputes about the past which have a vibrant, everyday presence in contemporary India? Can academic history aspire to a public life at all when the everyday politics of the republic is already dominated by high-decibel contests over history? These were the questions with which Dipesh Chakrabarty began his argument on the ‘public life of history’ in India in 2008. He showed us that, between the demands of colonial administrators and the needs of nationalist intellectuals, an unprecedented enthusiasm for history took shape long before the establishment of history as an academic discipline in India. By the 1930s, any earlier illusions about historical knowledge as based on universals or as a public good were clearly being undermined by what he calls the ‘history wars’, between say Hindus and Muslims, or between lower and upper castes. The casualty has been historical method itself. The burgeoning demands for pasts, as he points out, show no particular obligation to the historical methods of the professional historian, and may even repudiate them. Moreover, the continuing ‘history wars’ are largely carried on in courtrooms rather than classrooms, in public rallies or electoral processes rather than conferences or seminars. Professional historians in India are all too frequently confronted with the responsibility of maintaining a defence against the loquacity of our democratic age, the outpouring of passion and, often, unreason. A historical method appropriate to our age has yet to be defined. In 2012 I was forced to acknowledge both the limits of objectivity in the historical method as practised by professional historians, and the futility of proclaiming a ‘secular’ identity in the contentious field of Indian public histories. At the centre of a political controversy which arose in October that year was my authorship of a chapter in a Class Nine textbook (for fourteenyear-olds) entitled ‘Clothing: a Social History’. A wide range of groups and individuals from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu expressed fierce opposition to an illustrative example in the chapter. In addition to legal challenges and public denouncements, there were serious political protests at both state and
Class and Other Identities
The University Unthought, 2018
The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2020
Fin de siècle Mysore witnessed the gathering force of interminable rivalries of prestige between ... more Fin de siècle Mysore witnessed the gathering force of interminable rivalries of prestige between mathas (monastic institutions). Contests over the types and number of honours enjoyed by travelling gurus in Mysore became frequent, reaching a crescendo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By this time, the contests were also being adjudicated in courts, as the Mysore administration began to exert greater bureaucratic control over these institutions. The widening sphere of engagements of the modernising matha reveals that a new notion of publicness was taking shape, co-constituted by a triangulation of forces: on one side was the rapidly bureaucratising Mysore state which brought a different visibility and public accountability to the matha; a second side comprised the matha itself developing a new, socially purposive public life. Finally, the matha’s redefinition was aided and shaped by the adherents of the matha, emerging as a ‘public’ which both drew on and remained...
Studies in History, 2019
Missionaries working in Mysore, as elsewhere in India, took enthusiastically to the new art of ph... more Missionaries working in Mysore, as elsewhere in India, took enthusiastically to the new art of photography from the 1840s, to record their ‘views’ of the society they undertook to transform. Evangelising was, however, early on, allied with education as a way for missionaries to make their way into a complex, hierarchical society with learning traditions of its own. How did the missionary ‘see’ the Indian classroom, and invite the viewer of their photographs to participate in its narrative of ‘improvement’? What was the place of the photograph at a time when meticulous written records were kept of victories and reverses in the mission field of education? Revealing the work of the photograph in aiding missionary work must perforce begin with the more instrumentalist uses of this new art, as technologies of recording par excellence, before turning to the possible ways of looking at photographs, whether by those contemporaries of the missionaries who were physically distanced from the l...
Economic and Political Weekly, Dec 10, 1988
There is a place for everyone in US society, but a designated one. Native Americans on reservatio... more There is a place for everyone in US society, but a designated one. Native Americans on reservations, blacks in ghettoes, hispanics in the inner cities, and the rest in the safe dry spots
Economic and Political Weekly, May 3, 1986
Economic and Political Weekly, Oct 4, 2003
Economic and Political Weekly, Oct 7, 2000
Social Scientist, 1994
... over the inner, domestic domain before the contest for political power actually began.6 &... more ... over the inner, domestic domain before the contest for political power actually began.6 &amp;amp;#x27;Secular&amp;amp;#x27; nationalist discourse, Gyan Pandey has argued ... Congress Committee, affiliated to the KPCC was set up.15 Several young educated men such as ND Shankar, CB Monnaiah, S ...
Ecologies of Urbanism in India, 2013
Livre: The promise of the metropolis bangalore's twentieth century NAIR Janaki.
Gender <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> History, 1999
Studies in History, Jul 31, 2016
Review of development and change, Dec 1, 1997
Studies in History, Aug 1, 1999
History Workshop Journal, 2016
THINKING INDIAN PUBLIC HISTORY What prevents the ‘fact-respecting, secular historian’ in India fr... more THINKING INDIAN PUBLIC HISTORY What prevents the ‘fact-respecting, secular historian’ in India from gaining the attention of the public while wanting to adjudicate on disputes about the past which have a vibrant, everyday presence in contemporary India? Can academic history aspire to a public life at all when the everyday politics of the republic is already dominated by high-decibel contests over history? These were the questions with which Dipesh Chakrabarty began his argument on the ‘public life of history’ in India in 2008. He showed us that, between the demands of colonial administrators and the needs of nationalist intellectuals, an unprecedented enthusiasm for history took shape long before the establishment of history as an academic discipline in India. By the 1930s, any earlier illusions about historical knowledge as based on universals or as a public good were clearly being undermined by what he calls the ‘history wars’, between say Hindus and Muslims, or between lower and upper castes. The casualty has been historical method itself. The burgeoning demands for pasts, as he points out, show no particular obligation to the historical methods of the professional historian, and may even repudiate them. Moreover, the continuing ‘history wars’ are largely carried on in courtrooms rather than classrooms, in public rallies or electoral processes rather than conferences or seminars. Professional historians in India are all too frequently confronted with the responsibility of maintaining a defence against the loquacity of our democratic age, the outpouring of passion and, often, unreason. A historical method appropriate to our age has yet to be defined. In 2012 I was forced to acknowledge both the limits of objectivity in the historical method as practised by professional historians, and the futility of proclaiming a ‘secular’ identity in the contentious field of Indian public histories. At the centre of a political controversy which arose in October that year was my authorship of a chapter in a Class Nine textbook (for fourteenyear-olds) entitled ‘Clothing: a Social History’. A wide range of groups and individuals from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu expressed fierce opposition to an illustrative example in the chapter. In addition to legal challenges and public denouncements, there were serious political protests at both state and
Class and Other Identities
The University Unthought, 2018
The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2020
Fin de siècle Mysore witnessed the gathering force of interminable rivalries of prestige between ... more Fin de siècle Mysore witnessed the gathering force of interminable rivalries of prestige between mathas (monastic institutions). Contests over the types and number of honours enjoyed by travelling gurus in Mysore became frequent, reaching a crescendo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By this time, the contests were also being adjudicated in courts, as the Mysore administration began to exert greater bureaucratic control over these institutions. The widening sphere of engagements of the modernising matha reveals that a new notion of publicness was taking shape, co-constituted by a triangulation of forces: on one side was the rapidly bureaucratising Mysore state which brought a different visibility and public accountability to the matha; a second side comprised the matha itself developing a new, socially purposive public life. Finally, the matha’s redefinition was aided and shaped by the adherents of the matha, emerging as a ‘public’ which both drew on and remained...
Studies in History, 2019
Missionaries working in Mysore, as elsewhere in India, took enthusiastically to the new art of ph... more Missionaries working in Mysore, as elsewhere in India, took enthusiastically to the new art of photography from the 1840s, to record their ‘views’ of the society they undertook to transform. Evangelising was, however, early on, allied with education as a way for missionaries to make their way into a complex, hierarchical society with learning traditions of its own. How did the missionary ‘see’ the Indian classroom, and invite the viewer of their photographs to participate in its narrative of ‘improvement’? What was the place of the photograph at a time when meticulous written records were kept of victories and reverses in the mission field of education? Revealing the work of the photograph in aiding missionary work must perforce begin with the more instrumentalist uses of this new art, as technologies of recording par excellence, before turning to the possible ways of looking at photographs, whether by those contemporaries of the missionaries who were physically distanced from the l...
Economic and Political Weekly, Dec 10, 1988
There is a place for everyone in US society, but a designated one. Native Americans on reservatio... more There is a place for everyone in US society, but a designated one. Native Americans on reservations, blacks in ghettoes, hispanics in the inner cities, and the rest in the safe dry spots
Economic and Political Weekly, May 3, 1986
Economic and Political Weekly, Oct 4, 2003
Economic and Political Weekly, Oct 7, 2000
Social Scientist, 1994
... over the inner, domestic domain before the contest for political power actually began.6 &... more ... over the inner, domestic domain before the contest for political power actually began.6 &amp;amp;#x27;Secular&amp;amp;#x27; nationalist discourse, Gyan Pandey has argued ... Congress Committee, affiliated to the KPCC was set up.15 Several young educated men such as ND Shankar, CB Monnaiah, S ...
Ecologies of Urbanism in India, 2013
Livre: The promise of the metropolis bangalore's twentieth century NAIR Janaki.