Disintegration of the Moral Economy in Gopinath Mohanty’s Paraja

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-116
Author(s):  
Shailendra Kumar Singh
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
North India ◽  
Moral Outrage ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Colonial State

This article suggests that the concept of the moral economy of the peasant, as defined by James C. Scott, in the context of Southeast Asia, provides a compelling theoretical framework through which one can examine Gopinath Mohanty’s novel Paraja (1945), 2 2  This article takes its cue from a brilliant article written by Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay in which he usefully employs the concept of moral economy to analyse the peasant narratives of Premchand. See Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, ‘Premchand and the Moral Economy of Peasantry in Colonial North India’, Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 5 (2011): 1227–59. However, while Upadhyay equates the idea of moral economy with the traditional Indian concept of dharma, in order to explain the passivity of Premchand’s peasant protagonists, I have endeavoured to demonstrate, in this article, the disintegration of the moral economy in Gopinath Mohanty’s novel Paraja, and how such disintegration may precipitate resistance and a strong sense of moral outrage. an unparalleled achievement in Oriya literature that narrates the predicament of the tribal peasants of the Koraput region. It demonstrates how the encroachment of the colonial state on the invaluable resources of the tribal peasants in Mohanty’s novel results in an escalating disintegration of the moral economy which in turn precipitates resistance and a strong sense of moral outrage. However, instead of collective rebellion that Scott discusses about, in his groundbreaking work, in Mohanty’s novel, we find several instances of everyday forms of resistance, a concept that Scott formulates in his subsequent works. This not only helps us to understand and make sense of the motives and intentions of the tribal peasants in the novel but also underscores the abiding relevance and timeless appeal of Mohanty’s work, even in the post-Nehruvian nation-state, where the problems confronting the tribal peasants in the wake of globalisation are increasingly acute, virtually insurmountable and even more pronounced than ever before.

Going Against Whose Grain? Archaeological Theory and Southeast Asia's Premodern States

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 709-711
Author(s):  
Miriam T. Stark
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Resource Extraction ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Central Java ◽  
Southeast Asian Studies ◽  
Land Mass ◽  
History Of ◽  
Work Done

Southeast Asia is a paradox to Western scholars. Few are familiar with its history, yet Southeast Asia has been a veritable intellectual resource extraction zone for twentieth- and twenty-first-century social thought: imagined communities, galactic polities, agricultural involution and the moral economy of peasants all emanate from work done in Southeast Asia. The region's archaeological record is equally paradoxical: late Pleistocene ‘Hobbit’ hominins disrupt models of human origins, the world's largest Buddhist monument of Borobudur now sits in a wholly Muslim land mass in central Java, and the world's largest premodern city of Angkor is located in Cambodia, a country that remains resolutely rural. So we should not be surprised that Scott'sAgainst the Grain: A deep history of the earliest statesdraws from a career in Southeast Asian studies to study human history (the entire Anthropocene). This essay concentrates on how Scott believes early Mesopotamian states became legible.

scholarly journals Editorial – Zomia and beyond

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Michaud
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Himalayan Region ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Minority Studies ◽  
Hindu Kush ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis editorial develops two themes. First, it discusses how historical and anthropological approaches can relate to each other, in the field of the highland margins of Asia and beyond. Second, it explores how we might further our understandings of the uplands of Asia by applying different terms such as ‘Haute-Asie’, the ‘Southeast Asian Massif’, the ‘Hindu Kush–Himalayan region’, the ‘Himalayan Massif’, and in particular ‘Zomia’, a neologism gaining popularity with the publication of James C. Scott’s latest book, The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia.1 Through a discussion of the notion of Zomia, I will reconsider certain ‘truths’ regarding highland Asian studies. In the process, I seek to contribute to disembedding minority studies from the national straitjackets that have been imposed by academic research bounded by the historical, ideological, and political limits of the nation-state.

Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Youssef
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robust Analysis ◽  
Specific Approach ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Historical Moment

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.

Untimely Development, Ugly History:A Drama in Muslinand the Rejection of National-Historical Time

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Core

This article considers the politics and aesthetics of the colonial Bildungsroman by reading George Moore's often-overlooked novel A Drama in Muslin (1886). It argues that the colonial Bildungsroman does not simply register difference from the metropolitan novel of development or express tension between the core and periphery, as Jed Esty suggests, but rather can imagine a heterogeneous historical time that does not find its end in the nation-state. A Drama in Muslin combines naturalist and realist modes, and moves between Ireland and England to construct a form of untimely development that emphasises political processes (dissent, negotiation) rather than political forms (the state, the nation). Ultimately, the messy, discordant history represented in the novel shows the political potential of anachronism as it celebrates the untimeliness of everyday life.

Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (5) ◽  
pp. 1405-1423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Slaughter
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Nation State ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Human Personality ◽  
Full Development ◽  
International Human ◽  
Administrative Structures

With adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the United Nations conscripted, almost by default, the historically Euronationalist forms of the Bildungsroman and natural law to legitimate its vision of a new international order. This essay elaborates the conceptual vocabulary, deep narrative grammar, and humanist social vision that normative human rights law and the idealist Bildungsroman share in their cooperative efforts to articulate, normalize, and realize a world founded on the fundamental dignity and equality of what both the UDHR and early theorists of the novel term “the free and full development of the human personality.” Historically, formally, and ideologically, they are mutually enabling and complicit fictions: each projects, in advance of administrative structures comparable to those of the nation-state, an image of human personality and sociality that ratifies (and makes legible) the other's idealistic vision of the proper relations between individual and society. (JRS)

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