CHALLENGING DECOLONISATION AND POSTCOLONIALISM IN INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA DIRECTIONS FOR CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY (original) (raw)
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Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2020
This article develops a critical analysis of the colonial world of the postcolonial historians whose works inadvertently contribute to the process of reconstituting the colonial construction of tribal identities in neoliberal India. The monolithic and colonial construction of tribal identities in postcolonial India reinforces and preserves tribal identities along the lines of the colonial methods of identity formation based on territorialization. The article highlights the problematic features of the territorialization and deterritorialization of tribal identities and their reconstitution. Territorial-based identity formation is now being used and sustained by the neoliberal political and economic ruling and non-ruling elites in order to exploit tribal communities. The existence of upper-caste and class-based Hindu social order is concomitant with a social hierarchy based on the exploitation of tribal communities in India. This article locates the colonial and neoliberal capitalist ...
This book brings together some of the most prominent work in contemporary history writing in India—overall, a rare treat. The offerings combine insights from various disciplines including history, anthropology, cultural studies and literary criticism. Deeply informed by anti-humanist thinking, they seek to challenge the image of an all-encompassing and omnipotent empire, nation or community. Saurabh Dube pays particular attention to the diversity of work in the field of postcolonial history writing in India. His perceptive introduction discusses the broader intellectual context marked by intensified transactions between history and anthropology, heightened questioning of the Eurocentric canon in the academy, and critical engagement with Continental philosophy within history and anthropology, in which questions ofcolonialism and the complicity of Western knowledge in it were foregrounded. The result was the rise of ‘cultural histories and historical ethnographies that carefully question and critically elaborate colonialism and nationalism, state and nation, and modernity and its margins’. These are also efforts to think self-reflexively ‘through the ambiguities and possibilities of the postcolonial as a category’.
Politics of Identity and the Project of Writing History in Postcolonial India: A Dalit Critique
The central orientation of this article is organised around Dalit identity politics and their implications on the project of writing history in postcolonial India. It critically engages with the Subaltern Studies project as a school of postcolonial historiography that claims to represent the voice of the marginalised and yet stops short of acknowledging caste and caste-based oppression as worthy of historical analysis. In particular, it engages with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s reflections on Dalit identity politics in postcolonial India and argues that Dalits, while demanding sociopolitical equality and a dignified identity, also challenge the epistemologies of the nation and demand its historical narratives to be egalitarian and inclusive.
Indian Anthropologist, 2020
Sudipta Kaviraj’s work spans South Asian politics to intellectual history in India and is tangentially connected to the project of postcolonial and subaltern studies. Though his body of work is not enormous, the quality of his scholarship has been path-breaking. It has had a profound effect on, in general, South Asian studies and, in particular, in the analysis of the politics of the postcolonial Indian state and the creation of a post-nationalist intellectual-historical project that deconstructs the travesty of the so-called ‘Nationalist’ political history writing enterprise. This paper discusses the major contributions and ideas of Kaviraj around the emergence of nationalist thought in India. It traces the nature of colonial modernity; works of anti-colonial writers; postcolonial state making and the project of national reconstruction in India; and the slow transformations of the political-economic sphere of the independent Indian state in relation to the civil society.
The article situating the novel to its historical specificities attempts to unveil the workings of Hinduist hegemony in the characterisation of Bakha and Sohini. It also seeks to evaluate Bakha's incestuous fantasies about Sohini and the very relevance of it in the texture of the novel. In Mulk Raj Anand's literary landscape, Untouchable assumes a dignified status for being one of the early novels in English by an elite Hindu to depict the marginalisation and relentless oppression of the Untouchables in India. The novel evoked an instant socio-cultural uproar after its publication in Colonial India. Mahatma Gandhi is credited to have a significant role in editing the text that gained the status of literary voice in Gandhi's socio-cultural movements to eradicate practices of casteism and untouchability from India. Anand's Untouchable, though cannot be considered as the first literary tract that dealt with the plights of the untouchables, is often viewed as a sincere effort of a higher caste Hindu to stand against the inhuman practices of casteism gnawing India from within. But Anand's Untouchable is not a bolt from the blue, rather the novel is a fitting product of Anand's time. The focal point of discussion of this paper is to study whether Anand's Untouchable as a literary text speaks for the untouchables or it belongs to the dominating discourse of Hindu religion that has repeatedly curbed the liberating zeal of the Untouchables. From the second half of nineteenth century onwards, along with the struggles against British colonialism Indian history witnessed Dalit uprisings against Vedanta based Brahmanic tradition. Suppressing the heterogeneous religious voices, the upper caste Hindu elites made a homogenising effort by means of projecting India as a Hindu nation. Most of
Internal Colonization of the Indian Identity - Hindu Nationalism in a Postcolonial Setting
The reemergence of Hindu Nationalism in the Indian political sphere under BJP rule has brought an interesting contradiction to light. While at the ideological level, their construction of an identity of India rejects colonial influences, at a more practical level, colonial mechanisms are used to propagate the very ideals. Something that is considered national is achieved with something that is not. To answer this puzzle, this dissertation reviews literature on colonialism, postcolonialism and subalternity reveal the framework of internal colonization. This is coupled with a review of the historical context of the Hindu identity in the Indian subcontinent along with viewing recent mobilizations in the backdrop of an inevitably globalizing world. The discursive practices of several representatives of the BJP are analyzed (2014-2018) in relation to power. The results reveal that although contradictory on the face of it, the ideological and practical aspects of BJP function to instrumentalize culture in order to sustain and tilt the relations of power in their favor. While the construction of their identity on one hand, portrays a position of subalternity, it also reinforces the subalternity of other marginalized groups. The discursive practices of the representatives of the BJP actively work towards colonizing the Indian identity as well as the Hindu identity in the image of the Hindutva ideology.
Denationalisation and discrimination in postcolonial India
International Journal of Discrimination and the Law, 2022
With the recent National Register of Citizens updating process in Assam (a northeastern state in India) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA 2019), there have been significant changes to India’s citizenship laws and policies. This may create one of the world’s largest stateless populations in modern times. These changes manifest the government’s othering process of creating binaries of belonging and non-belongingness between the majority Hindus and minorities (especially followers of the Islamic faith). In this article, taking these recent changes to citizenship as a case study, I discuss how India’s colonial past, the experience of partition, and the henceforth nation-building contributed to perceiving the ‘citizen’ primarily along Hindu majoritarian lines. I argue that the nation-building process in India was based on retaining and simultaneously re-establishing the ‘others’, thereby reinforcing colonial legacies in the structure and functioning of the postcolonial state. Consequently, this article deals with two questions, first, how the adoption of discriminatory citizenship laws and the risk of statelessness in India is rooted in its complex history, the impact of British colonial expansion and the postcolonial realities and second, what role ‘law’ has played in the process.