Marx, Anderson and the Critique of Indian Political Economy and the Caste System

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-171
Author(s):  
Rajesh Sampath
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The South ◽  
Caste Discrimination ◽  
German Ideology ◽  
New Directions ◽  
British Colonial

This article will deconstruct the assumptions of the famous British Western Marxist, Anderson (2012) , and his recent critique of the Indian political economy in his controversial The Indian Ideology. Anderson’s work is a blistering critique of the origins of the post-British colonial Indian political-economy, society and culture. The paper examines different critical responses to Anderson’s work by Indian intellectuals in light of our re-interpretation of Marx and Engel’s classic, The German Ideology. Our aim is to critically appropriate the salience of Ambedkar’s ideas today in treating contemporary modalities of social exclusion, the continued practice of caste discrimination and political and constitutional responses to caste inequality. The paper argues for the development of new philosophical tools beyond the twentieth century Western Marxist frameworks, which informs the work of current thinkers like Anderson, to extend in new directions Ambedkar’s initial impulses in the South Asian critique of caste.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The South ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Frederick Law Olmsted

The introduction explores why the South became known as America’s “most documented” region beginning in the 1940s and into the twenty-first century. It argues that documentarians saw the region as a fertile place to do fieldwork for two main reasons. First, the region possessed unique and seemingly fragile folk cultures in need of preservation before modern influences erased them. Second, the region possessed seemingly endemic problems associated with its racial caste system and agricultural economies that needed documentation, study, and reform. The introduction also provides an overview of how historians and theorists defined “documentary” throughout the twentieth century and how and why some black and white southerners resisted the intrusion of documentarians into their lives. Additionally, it traces the history of documentary fieldwork in the South from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century and demonstrates how the tradition’s dominant themes developed during this time, particularly in the travel writings and sketches of Basil Hall, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jonathan Baxter Harrison and others. Finally, it highlights the distinguishing features of twentieth-century documentary by emphasizing the role of Progressive and New Deal reform impulses, the Folk Revival and Civil Rights Movement, and the development of portable recording technologies.

scholarly journals Ethnicity and social relations in Indonesian television production houses

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Myutel
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The Other ◽  
The South ◽  
Television Production ◽  
Cultural Frameworks ◽  
Material Capital

In Indonesia the industry producing the most popular commercial TV programmes, known assinetron, is largely dominated by Indonesians of Indian (Sindhi) origin. This article examines social relations within thesinetronproduction houses and argues that between the 1990s and the early 2010s the distribution of symbolic and material capital depended on ethnicity, as it was imagined and constituted by two rather different cultural frameworks and historical experiences. One is based on the occupational distinction, rooted in the South Asian caste system, while the other can be traced back to ethnic classifications in colonial Indonesia.

Islamic Identities in Colonial India

2018 ◽  
pp. 14-53
Author(s):  
Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British India ◽  
The South ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Subject ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter introduces many of the groups that will form the subject of this book and charts their emergence and development in conditions of British colonial rule. It shows that the traditionalist orientations that enjoy great prominence in the South Asian landscape began to take a recognizable shape only in the late nineteenth century, although they drew on older styles of thought and practice. The early modernists, for their part, were rooted in a culture that was not significantly different from the `ulama's. Among the concerns of this chapter is to trace their gradual distancing from each other. The processes involved in it would never be so complete, in either British India or in Pakistan, as to preclude the cooperation of the modernists and their conservative critics at critical moments. Nor, however, were the results of this distancing so superficial as to ever be transcended for good.

“What an inauspicious moment it turned out to be when she began to write!”: The Presentation and Position of the South Asian Woman Writer in Colonial Bengal

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-63
Author(s):  
Danielle Hall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Marital Relationships ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Asian Woman ◽  
South Asian Woman ◽  
The South ◽  
Education Of Women

Abstract This paper addresses the position and culturally loaded presentation of the South Asian woman writer in two colonial Bengali texts. Through a comparative analysis of Rabindranath Tagore’s “Nashtanir” (1901) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905), it explores the way in which both texts sought to engage with debates surrounding the education of women in the early twentieth century. It argues that the development of Charu’s extra-marital relationship in “Nashtanir,” coupled with Tagore’s representation of her as simple, superficial, and dangerous, gave weight to the claim that women’s education may contribute to a waning interest in domestic duties and facilitate the capacity to engage in extra-marital relationships. However, the analysis of Sultana’s Dream alternatively shows that the woman writer in colonial Bengal used her position to protest the barriers to women’s education in this context. By generating a text that invited its readers to engage in wider educational practises, Hossain produced a politically charged appeal which served to challenge misconceptions surrounding women’s education in colonial Bengal.

Partition Studies: Prospects and Pitfalls

2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joya Chatterji
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
The South ◽  
The Subject

Partition, unquestionably a pivotal event of the South Asian twentieth century, has become a subject of great significance in its own right.1Studies of partition began with a profound reexamination of why it happened;2they gathered momentum as scholars looked at the provincial and local roots of the drive to divide India;3and the subject took a big step forward when oral histories revealed how women and men experienced the traumas of its bloody upheavals, the violence of “the burning plains of the Punjab” becoming a metaphor for partition itself.4

scholarly journals Contribution of local and remote anthropogenic aerosols to the twentieth century weakening of the South Asian Monsoon

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 680-687 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimo A. Bollasina ◽  
Yi Ming ◽  
V. Ramaswamy ◽  
M. Daniel Schwarzkopf ◽  
Vaishali Naik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Asian Monsoon ◽  
South Asian Monsoon ◽  
The South ◽  
Anthropogenic Aerosols

Another Cosmopolis

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-76
Author(s):  
Ashis Nandy
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
The South ◽  
First Case

There is vague, random, empirical support for the persistence of some features in the South Asian concept of hospitality even among those who have experienced or witnessed large-scale ethnic cleansing and massive pogroms. Foremost among these features is the ability to live with radical diversities of the kind that can be easily seen as humiliating to other communities and capable of provoking ethnic and religious hostility and serious conflicts. The caste system with its ornate concepts of purity and pollution—and the touchable and the untouchable—is often seen as a prime example of this. Yet, persons, families, and communities can be found who navigate these barriers sometimes playfully and casually, sometimes by reading the offensive practices as cultural oddities of an otherwise friendly community that one must learn to respect. In the first case, by not taking the offending practices seriously enough; in the second case, by taking them seriously, as an essential part of the faith of another community that demands almost unconditional respect.

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Ashwin Desai ◽  
Goolam Vahed
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
South African ◽  
The South ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins with the promise of the Nelson Mandela presidency which made a commitment to building a ‘rainbow nation’ that would consign racism to the dustbin of history. Against this background, the opening chapter seeks to contextualize firstly the placing of Indians in the South African political economy through the long twentieth century that saw waves of colonialism, segregation and apartheid. It shows how through all these periods Indians were always regarded as outsiders and threatened with repatriation. It was only in 1961 a century after the arrival of the first indentured labourers that Indians were regarded as citizens. The chapter plays close attention to the way in which Indian South Africans reacted to discrimination and their attempts to build alliances with Africans. The chapter then zooms into the present and points to how the post-apartheid period raises in new ways the old chestnuts of diaspora, belonging, and citizenship.

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