Crab-Rangoons in Kyrat: (Re)Writing South-Asian History in Far Cry 4

2021 ◽  
pp. 155541202110052
Author(s):  
Souvik Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
South Asian History ◽  
Asian History ◽  
Border Thinking ◽  
Western Perspective

Recent research has started focusing on the representation of history in videogames. Such representation is almost always of mainstream history and usually presented from a Western perspective. Set in a fictitious Himalayan kingdom in South Asia, Ubisoft’s Far Cry 4 is arguably a crucial example of how history is represented using Western and even colonial frameworks and where the narratives that do not emerge from conventional written history are almost always rendered invisible. Using the frameworks of Subaltern Studies and “border-thinking,” this essay attempts to unpack issues of Orientalism and “colonial difference”; it then engages with postcolonial digital humanities and postcolonial game studies to comment on how history is represented in videogames and how the neglected gaps and silences in the game are important in constructing the historiography in videogames. In the process, the essay engages in a debate with current notions of videogame-historiography.

scholarly journals When the Subaltern Took the Postcolonial Turn

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-147
Author(s):  
John Roosa
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Series Editor ◽  
South Asian History ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Asian History

Abstract This essay evaluates the changing research agendas of Subaltern Studies, an influential series of books on South Asian history that began in 1982. The essay criticizes the original research agenda as articulated by the series editor, Ranajit Guha, and the subsequent agenda proposed by several members of the Subaltern Studies collective. Guha initially proposed that studies of colonial India understand power in terms of unmediated relationships between “the elite” and “the subaltern” and endeavour to answer a counterfactual question on why the “Indian elite” did not come to represent the nation. The subsequent agenda first formulated in the late 1980s, while jettisoning Guha’s strict binaries and crude populism, has not led to any new insights into South Asian history. The turn towards the issues of modernity and postcolonialism has resulted in much commentary on what is already known. Some members of the collective, in the name of uncovering a distinctly “Indian modernity” and moving beyond Western categories, have reified the concept of modernity and restaged tired old debates within Western social theory.

The Indian Princely States and Their Rulers

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angma D. Jhala
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
British Empire ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Heritage Tourism ◽  
British India ◽  
South Asian History ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Company Directors ◽  
Asian History ◽  
Trade Education

Colonial South Asian history has focused on British India and the nationalists who later resisted and supplanted it. However, long before India’s independence from Britain, there were regions where neither the British nor the nationalists were primarily positioned. These were the approximately six hundred semi-autonomous kingdoms, or “princely states” (often referred to as “Indian India”), which spanned the breadth and length of the subcontinent. They comprised two-fifths of the landmass and one-third of the population, excluding Burma. Though their rulers were long marginalized in modern South Asian and imperial history as antiquated relics of the medieval era, oriental despots, or puppet princes, they were real forces in the governing of the subcontinent, not only during the precolonial era but also at the heyday of the British Empire and continue to play a part in modern South Asia. Native rulers introduced new systems of administration, taxation, law, religious and social reform, trade, education, public health, and technology, including railways, ginning factories, and telegraphs, to their states; served as patrons of architecture, the arts, culinary innovation, and sport; encouraged the introduction of representative forms of government; and, in certain cases, supported popular anticolonial movements. In some principalities, where ruling families practiced different faiths from the majority of their citizens, their policies would influence the political trajectories of their erstwhile states long after the end of colonialism. With India’s independence and Partition in 1947, the princely states merged with the new nations of South Asia, and in the 1970s former princes lost their economic entitlement of the Privy Purse. However, they continued to play a part in postcolonial South Asia, serving as diplomats, governors, patrons of educational and charitable institutions, local magnates, company directors, cabinet ministers and, perhaps most prominently, as elected politicians and leaders of heritage tourism.

Indian Historical Writing, c.600–c.1400

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daud Ali
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
South Asian History ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Asian History

This chapter illustrates how the rise of renewed interest in precolonial South Asian history and literature has rendered the idea that South Asia lacked traditions of historical writing or historical consciousness. The only exception to this trend is the ‘indigenist’ position, heavily indebted to postcolonial studies, which argued that India's lack of historical consciousness should be seen as a virtue — history being an alien, European concept implicated in epistemic and material violence. Scholars working more closely with early materials, however, have developed a number of more refined positions on the question of historical writing in early India. For instance, scholars have claimed that historical consciousness and historical writing were not so much absent in early India as ‘denied’ by the epistemological assumptions of Brahmanical orthodoxy and its ideological quest to place the Veda outside of history.

Conceptual History and South Asian History

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-112
Author(s):  
Max Stille
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Review Article ◽  
The Political ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
South Asian History ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Asian History ◽  
Colonial Encounter

This review article provides an overview of important, recent approaches to conceptual history from scholarship on South Asia. While conceptual history is not a consolidated field in South Asia, the colonial encounter has greatly stimulated interest in conceptual inquiries. Recent scholarship questions the uniformity even of well-researched concepts such as liberalism. It is methodologically innovative in thinking about the influence of economic structures for the development of concepts. Rethinking religious and secular languages, scholars have furthermore stressed the importance of smaller communicative units such as genre or hermeneutical practices to shape ideas e.g. of the political. As part of global and imperial formations, scholars are well aware of the link between power and colonial temporalities. Lastly, they have suggested new sources for conceptual history, such as literature, film, and sound.

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