Narratives of Erasure

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-187
Author(s):  
Lucky Issar
Keyword(s):  
Indian Society ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
English Teacher ◽  
Indian Nation

This chapter examines R.K. Narayan's novel The English Teacher as a narrative of caste erasure. As he goes on to construct his “authentic,” “brahminical” India, he effectively erases caste-others by creating an exclusive, selective imaginary of Indian nation as upper-caste. This construction requires caste erasure and suppression of “queerness” that constantly poses a threat to caste-based ideological formulations of Indian society as brahminical, Hindu, and hetero-normative. Through the close reading of the text, the author shows that caste not only damages Dalits, but it makes a deleterious impact on the upper castes and by extension on the whole Indian society.

Between Science and Religion: An Astrological Interpretation of the Asian Tsunami in India

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-249
Author(s):  
Liang Yongjia
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Indian Ocean Tsunami ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Indian Nation ◽  
The Indian Ocean

AbstractAstrology plays an important role in Indian social life. Indian astrologers' claim to have accurately predicted the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, or the Asian Tsunami, was an effort to legitimize astrology as a full science. This effort demonstrates a difficulty in knowledge categorization, for in India, astrology is neither classified as a science nor as a religion. This is a result of the idea of an Indian nation-state, which rests upon both science and religion as foundations, but at the expense of expelling astrology from religion for not being scientific. However, as astrology continues to be important in India, the astrological interpretation of the Indian Ocean Tsunami drew substantial public attention. Astrology's significant presence in Indian society shows the role of a mature civil society in India as well.

scholarly journals Love Jihad and the Governance of Gender and Intimacy in Hindu Nationalist Statecraft

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1068 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Bo Nielsen ◽  
Alf Gunvald Nilsen
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Legal Violence ◽  
Authoritarian Populism ◽  
Indian Nation ◽  
The Status

What role does the Islamophobic theory of “love jihad” play in the politics of Hindu nationalist statecraft—the legal codification of Hindu nationalist ideology—in India today? In this article, we address this question through a critical analysis of how the idea of “love jihad” relate to both (a) a conservative politics of governing gender and intimacy in which women are constituted as subjects of protection and (b) an authoritarian populism grounded in a foundational opposition between true Indians and their anti-national enemies within. The article begins by exploring how “love jihad” has transformed from an idea that was used to legitimize extra-legal violence by Hindu nationalist vigilantes to the status of law, with a particular focus on the BJP-ruled state of Uttar Pradesh. We then situate the “love jihad” laws in relation to a regime of gender governance that constitutes women as subjects of protection - and specifically protection by state and nation—and discuss how this resonates with a pervasive patriarchal common sense in Indian society. Finally, we show how “love jihad” laws and the wider conservative politics of gender and intimacy within which it is embedded feeds into the authoritarian politics of the Modi regime, in which Muslims are consistently portrayed as enemies of the Indian nation, and reflect on what this entails for the country’s secular political order.

scholarly journals Fallacy, sacrilege, betrayal and conspiracy: the cultural construction of opposition to immunisation in India

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niels Brimnes
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Bcg Vaccination ◽  
National Body ◽  
Indian Nation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Recurrent Theme

While the history of immunisation in India is mainly about some of the world’s most extensive programmes, this article focusses on four instances of well-articulated opposition to immunisation from elite sections of Indian society. Analysing an anti-vaccination pamphlet from 1921, Gandhi’s writings on immunisation and medicine, protests against BCG vaccination in the first decades after independence, and Debabar Banerji’s vociferous criticism of immunisations programmes since the 1970s, it explores how the opposition was culturally constructed and linked to imaginations of the Indian nation. The article finds that a recurrent theme is the notion that immunisation is – due to distinctive features of Indian society and culture – particularly problematic in India, rather than strengthening the national body, immunisation threatens to destroy it.

Of ‘Metaphorical’ Politics: Bombay Films and Indian Society

1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajanta Sircar
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Indian Nation ◽  
The Many ◽  
A Site ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Cultural Developments

Having followed Modern Asian Studies for some time now as being among the major journals to have sustained a high degree of sophistication on debates relating to the historical and cultural developments of modern South Asia, one was greatly distressed to read Akbar S. Ahmed's article ‘Bombay Films: The Cinema as Metaphor for Indian Society and Politics’. Practices of representation always implicate positions of enunciation. In what follows, I wish to re-read Ahmed's article to show that his representations of Indian society derive their legitimacy not from their engagement with the many-layered sociocultural formation of the present-day Indian nation, but from a perspective which reinforces the continuing relations of dominance between metropolis and former colony. As an academician of and for present-day India, to challenge such a perspective is not merely an attempt to radicalize academic frameworks but, as I wish to show, expressive of a larger social need to create spaces where one is able to transform present reality. It is to identify marginality as much more than a site of deprivation. It is to identify marginality as a space of resistance, as a site of radical possibility.

Food as Power

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kiana Choi
Keyword(s):  
Substance Abuse ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
School Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Residential School ◽  
English Teacher ◽  
Indigenous Identity ◽  
Indigenous Youth

This paper is a critical analysis through a close reading of Eden Robinson’s short story, “Traplines” that addresses the topic of Indigenous identity, particularly the identity of Indigenous youth in the wake of the parents’ generation residential school experience.  Robinson’s story focusses on the life of a teenaged Indigenous boy called Will, who is exposed to family violence and substance abuse, going to school in town. I argue that the text emphasizes the colonizing nature of non-Indigenous interference in the lives of families like Will's as proof of continuing colonization. Will's English teacher and other white characters use their white privilege in and outside of places of consumption as representations of power in the text. The result of this imbalance of power is the development of a confusing fragmentation of identity in the Indigenous youth. In its discussion of Will’s confusion, the text raises questions about the nature of education.  

Stolen from the Snows: John Kinsella as Poet and as Fiction Writer

CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-238
Author(s):  
Nicholas Birns
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Artistic Identity ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Fiction Writer

This piece explores the fiction of John Kinsella, describing how it both complements and differs from his poetry, and how it speaks to the various aspect of his literary and artistic identity, After delineating several characteristic traits of Kinsella's fictional oeuvre, and providing a close reading of one of Kinsella's Graphology poems to give a sense of his current lyrical praxis, the balance of the essay is devoted to a close analysis of Hotel Impossible, the Kinsella novella included in this issue of CounterText. In Hotel Impossible Kinsella examines the assets and liabilities of cosmopolitanism through the metaphor of the all-inclusive hotel that envelops humanity in its breadth but also constrains through its repressive, generalising conformity. Through the peregrinations of the anti-protagonist Pilgrim, as he works out his relationships with Sister and the Watchmaker, we see how relationships interact with contemporary institutions of power. In a style at once challenging and accessible, Kinsella presents a fractured mirror of our own reality.

Labels, Histories, Politics: Indian/South Asian Dance on the Global Stage

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
AVANTHI MEDURI
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The South ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Indian Nation ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Uk

In this paper, I discuss issues revolving around history, historiography, alterity, difference and otherness concealed in the doubled Indian/South Asian label used to describe Indian/South Asian dance genres in the UK. The paper traces the historical genealogy of the South Asian label to US, Indian and British contexts and describes how the South Asian enunciation fed into Indian nation-state historiography and politics in the 1950s. I conclude by describing how Akademi: South Asian Dance, a leading London based arts organisation, explored the ambivalence in the doubled Indian/South Asian label by renaming itself in 1997, and forging new local/global networks of communication and artistic exchange between Indian and British based dancers and choreographers at the turn of the twenty-first century.

‘Nothing is simply one thing’: Woolf, Deleuze and Difference

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-474
Author(s):  
Beatrice Monaco
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
To The Lighthouse

This paper explores some key texts of Virginia Woolf in the context of Deleuzian concepts. Using a close reading style, it shows how the prose poetry in Mrs Dalloway engages a complex interplay of repetition and difference, resulting in a remarkably similar model of the three syntheses of time as Deleuze understands them. It subsequently explores Woolf's technical processes in a key passage from To the Lighthouse, showing how the prose-poetic technique systematically undoes the structures of logical fact and rationality inscribed in both language and everyday speech to an extremely precise level.

Resonance in Dhvani Aesthetics and the Deleuzian Logic of Sensation

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Srajana Kaikini
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Sanskrit Poetics ◽  
Comparative Framework ◽  
Time Image

This paper undertakes an intersectional reading of visual art through theories of literary interpretation in Sanskrit poetics in close reading with Deleuze's notions of sensation. The concept of Dhvani – the Indian theory of suggestion which can be translated as resonance, as explored in the Rasa – Dhvani aesthetics offers key insights into understanding the mode in which sensation as discussed by Deleuze operates throughout his reflections on Francis Bacon's and Cézanne's works. The paper constructs a comparative framework to review modern and classical art history, mainly in the medium of painting, through an understanding of the concept of Dhvani, and charts a course of reinterpreting and examining possible points of concurrence and departure with respect to the Deleuzian logic of sensation and his notions of time-image and perception. The author thereby aims to move art interpretation's paradigm towards a non-linguistic sensory paradigm of experience. The focus of the paper is to break the moulds of normative theory-making which guide ideal conditions of ‘understanding art’ and look into alternative modes of experiencing the ‘vocabulary’ of art through trans-disciplinary intersections, in this case the disciplines being those of visual art, literature and phenomenology.

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