After Conversion. Cultural Histories of Modern India. (original) (raw)
Several years ago I was transfixed with horror at the sight of a book cover. The title of the book read: "The Last Professors." I felt as if I had been reading my own obituary, printed in bold letters to make the message crystal clear: you had better pack your bags and book a cheap ticket to an academic scrap heap because we do not want you here anymore. 'What on earth happened to my profession?' I asked myself. Are we all doomed to early retirement and swift oblivion? Fortunately, what Frank Donoghue, the author of the book, argues is not so melodramatic although his claim definitely deserves closer inspection. He is mostly concerned with how the growing pressure on universities to become corporate institutions imperils the status of tenured professors. It seems that soon they will have to adapt or die out.
Like the narrator in Antoine de Saint Exupery's The Little Prince, I felt stranded in a desert beside my crashed aircraft-Voices. For over a year I had been trying to reassemble it and escape this void. And then during the ides of March I conjured up images of its withering away. Most disheartening were the spate of outpourings on the virtual media-e-journals, web-journals, on-line journals, a whole jungle of wild-rose bushes-a deluge, a groundswell, that most certainly could wash away my 'rose', so painstakingly nurtured over the past ten years. 'Lord', said I, 'I question whether I can take much more …/ No more afters or before'? Is my Voices just another spoke in an unhinged wheel? In an attempt to break the ennui, I settled my debts and dropped my last coin in the wishing well. And lo and behold, at my singular behest, the genie opened flood gates that could outmatch the webbed tsunami. A texted request and 'Orwell, Foucault and Modernism' came by return mail, to be quickly followed by Sanjukta Dasgupta, Santosh Gupta, Mini Nanda, Anuradha Marwah, Rakshanda Jalil … it was unending and the crashed aircraft is ready for flight! Thank you Prof. Jasbir Jain for this spur to re-begin a stalled journey and what could be more relevant than what Orwell and Foucault stand for, our 'locatedness' in these times of 'virtual' encroachments that goad us on to preserve ourselves, our privacy, despite the traumatising 'progress'. Professor Sanjukta Dasgupta's article on Tagore's poetic psyche replenishes our quest for confidence and creativity in these ambivalent times. Professor Santosh Gupta homes back to the polemics of the prison and how these can become transforming spaces which can empower one to overthrow the victim image and Dr Mini Nanda argues that 'I am' must be asserted for a domino effort so that we, especially women, do not have to succumb to unfairness and injustice. Taking up Indian women pioneers from the 19th century she weaves a dialectic of uprising. From the two nodal points of justice and fairness Anuradha Marwah begins her questioning, the 'why' in Media and Kabuliwala. Spanning her search over nearly two centuries she argues how 'social justice' has become so very critical in our times. It was so when times began and it is so now that I am 'man'! Sunita Agarwal furthers the exploration of creativity by re-contextualizing the innovative folk theatre as a means of reinventing ourselves in these apocalyptic times. The human movement that Professor Jasbir Jain talks of and Anuradha Marwah expounds, Nidhi Singh takes up as myths of dislocation and relocation. Peggy Mohan's Jahagin becomes the beginning of an attempt to decode immigrant experience that forces one to navigate unknown terrains in order to validate the 'self' and combat fracturing 'otherness'. The journey metaphor. continues with Charu Mathur's historiographic narration of the Partition enshrined in Salman Rashid's A Time of Madness which simultaneously posits the literary relevance of a memoir. Charu Mathur sums up by emphasizing a 'fluid relevance' which could undermine fossilized terror. And, what could be more befitting than valorising 'Charal' literature which gives the Bengal Dalits courage to swim against counter currents and live life at their own terms. It is not a giant step to arrive on the threshold of 'feminism', what Mini Nanda began and Nidhi Singh added to is continued in Swatti Dhanwani reading of Sita's Sister by Kavita Kane. The hermeneutical analysis helps bridge opposing contentions about Urmila, the unsung wife of Lakshman in the Ramayan, opening a more validating space for her. Alpana then decodes enslavement and emancipation in Masaan (2015). In analysing cinema as text Alpana ends on the promise of a new horizon of hope. The next section, poetry, works out the myriad colours of 'hope' and 'despair'. Opening with Lakshmi Kanan's '14th of April' there is promise that whenever the Neem buds will bloom it'll be a new year again! Sanjukta Dasgupta too vows to overcome the 'enemy' till 'Doves of hope settle on their open palms in her 'Hope'. However the 'Lockdown Blues' demand a 'New Normal and I' which is bizzare and surreal, where the 'contagion continues to spike and surge' but she ends 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind? echoing the prophetic Shelley. Sandeep Sen's 'Obituary' to the 9/11 victims is as relevant today for 'they were us', all those who died, die and are dying. But lives matter and it is 'Hope' again which can drive the darkness out, and it leaks through unknown spaces. Sen's 'Asthama', 'Quarantine' and 'Saline Drip' seem to be stages where we recognize that 'breathing' is a 'blessing' and in the quarantine that has been imposed one becomes more conscious of the chirping birds, the colours of leaves and skies and also more aware of those for whom we did not 'make time'-family, neighbour, neglected friend. But this 'Saline Drip' will vi • Editorial indeed regenerate, refine and rekindle and soon wash away the fuzziness that has crept over us. Rashmi Narzary takes us back 'years and years ago' and then brings us back 'years and years later' thanking God for a 'blessed life' where fireflies light the night and nature sustains us. Rakshanda Jalil sounds a warning note again in her translation of Javed Akhtar's 'Hum-safar' that the scorching-searing road that we are walking today leads not to bliss but to destitute isolation with no fireflies to light the dark night. The fire in the bellies consumes one's hopes and reduces him to naught as realization dawns that there are only two castes-the rich and the poor. But Manasvini Rai again raises hopes and 'In Continuum' affirms that love's labours would again, perhaps, accumulate and transform the vision where once expanses were parched. Joya Chakravarty writes another 'Obituary' for our own 'plain Janes' who live a death-in-life with no one to hold their hands in grief. But 'plain' you may be yet there is much in a name to make us glide through the tangles and find our roses. The book review section with four intensive explorations makes for critical reading at its best. Professor Mukesh Srivastava unfolds the dialogics of censorship while looking at Rajiv Dhawan's book. Natasa Milandinovic reviews Susheel Sharma's Unwinding Self, a collection of poems, and forays into aspects of knowing and unknowing, of Atman and Man. On a lighter note Anuradha Marwah reviews Jeanie Cummin's American Dirt and ressurrects it from searing criticism. Bandana Chakrabarty's review of Jasbir Jain's Interpreting Cinema: Adaptations, Intertexualities, Art Movements is a literary insider into the book's polyphonic dialogic. Spaced between the poems and the reviews is a memoir, a testimony of those first flushes that dislocation embarrasses us with before we settle down to the graveness of re-location. As a newly transported immigrant Shubhshree flaunts her inherited riches with innocent aplomb till life teaches one to pack 'herself' till more opportune times. A beautiful encounter of a 'dil hai hindustani' with acculturation blues! These pieces sewn together in this volume testify how 'what was invisible to the eye' has been slowly uncovered, layer by layer; what we see is only the shell, what is truly important we connot see-a lesson from The Little Prince again to round it up. Here I would gratefully acknowledge Annanya's depiction of the essence of the book The Little Prince which frame the cover of this issue. For fellow travellers in literature, I hope these 'fire flies' will light up areas of darkness and pave the way for a better knowing. Adieu, till the next issue!
Editors’ introduction: telling academic lives
2014
The historian, before he begins to write history, is the product of history…. It is not merely the events that are in flux. The historian himself is in flux…. Before you study the history, study the historian. (E.H. Carr, 1961) 1 ELLING ACADEMIC LIVES IS A COLLECTION of historical biographies that examine historians and anthropologists, their lives, careers, institutional affiliations, challenges and achievements. In short, it deals with academics as real people. The six historians whose biographical analyses form this special edition are part of a wider Zeitgeist, namely embodied histories and a return to the humane. It is as if the new century starts-yet again-a turn towards the individual, the specific, the unique and the irreplaceable, as features of humanness. The historian and biographer Barbara Caine writes: "Biography has long been seen as part of history and a way to enliven it by rendering the past 'more human', more vivid, more intimate, more accessible, more connected to ourselves." History as an analysis of the past has had many high hopes invested in it: for telling us where we are coming from and thus where T
"in Saurabh Dube, Sanjay Seth, Ajay Skaria (eds.), *Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Global South: Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Perspectives, and the Anthropocene*, Routledge, 2020., 2020
An earlier version of this chapter has been posted as "Figures of Modernity" on academia.edu: the shifts between the last and this version should be evident to anyone who has read the previous one. The present chapter also unravels the pervasive presence of distinct scholasticism(s) – involving the substitution of any contentious “is” by their own “ought” – in academic and everyday worlds. Indeed, I explore how these tendencies are tied to formidable conceits of knowledge-making that are variously founded on terms of transcendence, secular yet prophetic, which come to haunt even those bids that seek to escape them. Throughout, I shall seek to unravel, if often implicitly, the place of a worldly immanence – itself tied to textures of affect and embodiment, formations of the sensuous and the political – as a means of approaching and understanding the past and present. At the end, I shall draw together these considerations by articulating anew my prior proposal made in 2004 of a “history without warranty”, propositions in which an engagement with Dipesh loomed large, often implicitly but also otherwise. Clearly, running through this chapter is a querying of the prerogatives of scholasticisms, especially the immaculate ought they betoken and betray, in academic arenas. Here, I approach the academy as a culturally and politically layered arena, constituted by distinct formations of privilege and hierarchy, entitlements and their interrogations, which turn, for instance, on gender and caste, class and race, status and sexuality. Academic arenas can be thought of, then, as rather in the manner of an ethnographic fields, located in space-time, ever part of social worlds with their own quotidian cultures, in which academics work but also live. The utterances and practices of scholarly subjects, especially those of the observer, in everyday academic spaces – for example, seminars, cafes, bookshops, and social media – can be enormously revealing here. Such routine words and reflex gestures often reveal wider assumptions and affects, entitlements and experiences of intellectual terrains. Unsurprisingly, too, despite the constant clamor of academic arguments as being unsullied by everyday worlds, the certified statements within academy are also haunted by the mundane, its perversions and possibilities. Indeed, the point precisely might be to not separate the everyday assumption and the accredited expression of intellectual endeavor. For, taken together, at stake are un-said, under-said, and already-said orientations and arguments undergirding life and understanding within academic cultures. In the pages ahead, I explore at once the quotidian manifestations and the licensed expressions of scholarly domains. It is in these ways that I also intimate, necessarily implicitly, the wider terms of privilege and their questioning in social worlds, which academic arenas embody and in which they are embedded, albeit of course in their own ways.
*Disciplines of Modernity*, 2022
*Disciplines of Modernity* turns to three connected congeries of considerations. First, the work seeks to understand anthropologies and histories as themselves insinuating disciplines of modernity, approaching the terms in capacious yet critical ways that extend these institutionalized enquiries beyond conventional claims of their being merely modern disciplines. Second, it attends simultaneously to subjects of privilege and precarity, particularly as turning upon elites and Dalits. Finally, the book explores figures of affect and entitlement, including as drawing in the terms and textures of (earthly) immanence and (modern) scholasticism. Each of these distinct yet overlapping procedures engages, expresses, and articulates often cunning, even uncanny, archives of modernity, which straddle tacit meanings, explicit authority, and their pervasive admixtures.
Resistance and invention: Becoming academic, remaining other
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2017
In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry into both the broad given-ness of the norms of the neoliberal academy and our simultaneous compliance with and resistance to these norms. We choose to comply because we are invested in becoming academics; we continue to research and write for conferences and publication and to frame our scholarly work in terms of how it can be used on our CVs. We choose to resist by working collaboratively and towards remaining intelligible (both to ourselves and to those outside the academy) while becoming scholars. Here we put several concepts to work to think about the role of the writing group in our experiences as becoming-scholars, in particular ‘becoming-minoritarian,’ ‘schizoid subjectivities,’ ‘agential assemblage,’ and ‘institutional passing.’ Then, to think about how we (might) live through the process of becoming academic, we turn to the concept of survivance.
Deconstructive Misalignment: Archives, Events, and Humanities Approaches in Academic Development
Using poetry, role play, readers’ theatre, and creative manipulations of space through yarn and paper weaving, a workshop in 2008 challenged one of educational development’s more pervasive and least questioned notions (“constructive alignment” associated most often with the work of John Biggs). This paper describes the reasoning behind using humanities approaches specifically in this case and more generally in the Challenging Academic Development Collective’s work, as well as problematising the notions of “experiment” and “results” by unarchiving and re-archiving such a nonce-event. The critical stakes in using an anti-empirical method are broached, and readers are encouraged to experience their own version of the emergent truths of such approaches by drawing their own conclusions. En 2008, par le biais de la poésie, du jeu de rôles, du théâtre lu et de manipulations créatrices de l’espace avec de la laine et des tissages en papier, un atelier a mis au défi une des notions les plus généralisées et les moins remises en question du développement éducatif, l’alignement constructif, le plus souvent associé aux travaux de John Biggs. Cet article décrit le raisonnement qui se cache sous l’utilisation des approches des humanités tout spécialement dans ce cas et de manière plus générale dans les travaux du Collectif sur le développement académique stimulant. L’article traite également de la problématique sur les notions d’« expérience » et de « résultats » en désarchivant et en réarchivant une telle circonstance. Les enjeux principaux de l’utilisation de cette méthode anti-empirique sont abordés et les lecteurs sont encouragés à faire l’expérience de leur propre version des vérités qui émergent de telles approches en tirant leurs propres conclusions.