Postnational and Minority Cultures (original) (raw)
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Hierarchy and its discontents : caste, postcoloniality and the new humanities
2001
rights and citizenship. In the process it attempts to keep intact the asymmetrical power relations that characterize the domain of the people-nation in the first place. In his recent study of the Balmiki community in North India, Vijay Prashad uses the term “established anti-untouchability” (1999, 180) to point to the absences that inhabit the “enlightened social legislation” (181) of the State. Such legislation does not even begin to 85 address the advantages that the upper caste bourgeoisie have enjoyed throughout India’s long history of caste exploitation. In fact, such advantages which give the upper-caste bourgeoisie a historical head start over the dalits, are ever so often rendered invisible in attempts to invoke notions of “merit”, “efficiency” and “equal opportunity” every time the issue of affirmative action comes to the fore. Further, it is always the majoritarian nationalist who invokes images of integration and harmony when talking about liberal democratic nationhood. F...
Caste and Equality in India: A Historical Anthropology of Diverse Society and Vernacular Democracy, London: Routledge, 2021. , 2021
The incongruence between elite nationalism and popular patriotism was poignantly exposed after India’s independence. Chapters 6 and 7 describe the postcolonial predicament in the early 1990s, where there was a disjunction between the politico-economic sphere based on ‘the logic of the fish’ (where a big fish eats a smaller one) and the socio-ritual sphere based on the logic of the sharing in the community. Chapter 6 explores the socio-cultural sphere of postcolonial Indian rural society through ethnographic data. The order of the body, society and nature is believed to be maintained when a body is born from a union between a man and woman who match each other, ‘eat’ the proper land and perform the prescribed duty as sacrifice in accordance with the ‘tradition’. Here, we find the idea that the balance of the whole is maintained in the service of each one whose position is distinct in terms of food, gender, living space and work. The idea of the connection between body, kinship and land is also closely related to people’s ideas and practices of the agricultural cycle and annual reproduction. Farming and ritual activities related to rice cultivation involve community relationships, the division of agricultural and ritual labour, a cyclic view of time coinciding with the annual cycle of rice farming and an intimate connection with the worship of the earth as goddess, the whole of which has a sense of harmony and contact with the sacred. It is through the ritual processes that the seemingly harmonious and holistic world of ‘traditional culture’ is most prominently represented, enacted, reaffirmed and also transformed and recreated. It should be noted, however, that this idealised ‘organic whole’ is contained within the limited sphere of the socio-cultural and does not constitute the moral basis of the politico-economic sphere, dominated by the cash economy and factional politics. The idealised religio-ontological identity is stressed precisely in contrast to the politico-economic realities.
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’.