Gendered Subaltern in Abhi Subedi’s Dreams of Peach Blossoms

This paper examines the consciousness of gendered subaltern in Abhi Subedi’s poetic play Dreams of Peach Blossoms and looks at how Subedi deconstructs the existing historiography to bring forth the issue of gendered subaltern who have been subjected to the hegemony of the ruling class. Drawing on insights and postulations from Subaltern Studies theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, Gautam Bhadra and others, this paper examines the pain and agonies of female characters that are glossed over in the grand narrative of the mainstream culture. This paper concludes that while exploring the painful experience of women erased from the pages of history, Subedi is focused on the Maiju culture that began since Bhrikuti’s marriage to a Tibetan King in the sixth century and reveals the injustice of patriarchy against women with an aim to make correction in such distortions of history.

Rethinking Biopolitics and Governance in India during the Covid-19 Pandemic

The article critically examines the different strategies through which the Union government of India is battling against the novel coronavirus outbreak. In particular, the article examines the socio-economic implications of India’s nation-wide lockdown (25 March 2020–31 May 2020), and how one can conceptualise the same from a biopolitical framework. The article heavily draws from the works of influential thinkers such as Michel Foucault (1977, 2003, 2007), Giorgio Agamben (1998), Achille Mbembe (2019) and Partha Chatterjee (2006), to analyse the Indian state’s responses to Covid-19. The data deployed in this article is largely gathered from the author’s observations of the lockdown, and secondary sources such as newspaper articles, reports published by international and national organisations, academic journals, and social media websites. The main objectives of this article were to provide a critical reading of India’s ‘lockdown’ approach and ‘necropolitical governmentality,’ and understand how implementing the same has adversely impacted and reconfigured the social and the quotidian life of citizens.

Book review: Partha Chatterjee et al. (Eds.), After the Revolution

Partha Chatterjee et al. (Eds.), After the Revolution. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2020, 314pp. (Paperback). ISBN: 978-93-90122-75-2.

Book review: Partha Chatterjee (ed.). After the Revolution: Essays in Memory of Anjan Ghosh

Partha Chatterjee (ed.). After the Revolution: Essays in Memory of Anjan Ghosh (Hyderabad, India: Orient BlackSwan), 2020, 346 pp., ₹925 (hb).

Anticolonialism and the Decolonization of Political Theory

This essay surveys some recent attempts to decolonize political theory and engage with non-western political thinkers and traditions, especially anticolonialism. Our concern is that these engagements remain too centered on western political thought as the object of critique and analysis. Through the example of Gandhi and Fanon, we argue that anticolonialism, while engaged in a critique of the west, also had a positive or reconstructive theoretical agenda, one that has been taken up in creative ways in postcolonial political thought. Taking cues from the work of Sudipta Kaviraj, Partha Chatterjee, and Mahmood Mamdani, the essay proposes an alternative mode of decolonizing political theory that takes as its central aim the generation of theory from a study of postcolonial politics. It argues for a historically attuned and comparative approach to postcolonial politics that aims to innovate new concepts and reanimate inherited ones. From this perspective, decolonizing political theory is less a recurring critique of Eurocentrism than an effort to shift the terrain of theorizing and thereby reinvigorate the practice of political theory as such.

Can the Gandharvas Speak?: A Study of Gandharva Songs

In the social context of Nepal, Gandharvas are regarded as Dalits, the people who are suppressed and silenced by the society. Such subaltern groups are thought to have no voice. They are considered ‘muted’ or ‘inarticulate’ without any agency, consciousness and power of resistance. However, breaking such boundaries, the present research aims at exploring the voices of Gandharvas expressed through their folk songs, which express their real subaltern condition and a sense of dissatisfaction towards the mechanism of society constructed and controlled by the elites. For this, some of the representative folk songs are taken and viewed from the perspective of subaltern voice, consciousness, resistance and agency developed by Antonio Gramsci, Ranjit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee and Gautam Bhadra. With the thorough analysis of their songs, it is inferred that although they are deprived of any rank and recognition in the mainstream Nepali society, they have clearly expressed their voices as well as manifested consciousness, reflecting their real life experiences marked by domination, marginalization and suppression. The manifestation of such consciousness and expression of inner voice is also used as an instrument to subvert the hegemony constructed by the complacent upper class of the society.

Zionism, Pan-Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament in the Interwar Writings of Eugen Hoeflich

In the early 1920s, the Viennese writer and journalist Eugen Hoeflich promoted a unique vision of Zionism that aligned Jewish nationalism with a set of anticolonial ideologies collectively known as Pan-Asianism. This article explores the poetic and political strategies Hoeflich employed in order to affiliate Zionism with the Pan-Asian idea in general, and the Indian anticolonial struggle in particular. I read Hoeflich's turn to Pan-Asianism as an attempt to work through a conceptual problem that theorist Partha Chatterjee calls the “postcolonial predicament.” That is, how might the Jews assert their collective identity without reproducing the Eurocentric discourses that presuppose their inferiority? Hoeflich's vision of Indian-Jewish solidarity constitutes an imaginative effort to de-Europeanize Jewish nationalism and disentangle Zionism from British imperial designs. On a broader level, this study sheds light on the transnational solidarities that informed central European Zionists in the interwar era, and points to the discursive continuities that linked Jewish nationalists in Europe to anticolonial thinkers in Asia.

Expanding the Southern urban critique: Elite politics, popular politics, and self-governance in the wards of Mandalay

This article explores everyday urban governance and politics in Mandalay, Myanmar. We examine this through a focus on state-society interactions within Mandalay’s ward offices, which are the lowest tier of the administrative backbone of the Myanmar state known as the General Administration Department. This reveals the existence of three intertwined forms of urban ‘politics’ in Mandalay: elite politics, which echo the practices of civil society in the sense of Partha Chatterjee; popular politics, which echo the practices of political society; and self-governance, which is an approach to politics culturally and historically situated in Theravada Buddhism and Myanmar’s authoritarian legacies. The situatedness of the case prompts us to argue in favor of expanding the southern urban critique beyond its conventional focus on liberal democratic metropolises of the global South, in order to enrich our understanding of what constitutes postcolonial urban politics. We suggest this could be achieved, as we attempt here, by adopting collaborative research methodologies and by extensively building on southern area scholarship in ways that mediate epistemic expropriation.

LA ESPACIALIDAD DE LA INTERSECCIÓN: UNA LECTURA POSCOLONIAL DE LA ECONOMÍA POPULAR EN ARGENTINA

En este artículo se propone identificar las contribuciones de la lectura poscolonial de Partha Chatterjee a la intelección de la economía popular argentina contemporánea como espacialidad de la intersección. Al ser una indagación de corte teórico, las reflexiones esbozadas fueron elaboradas con base en una investigación teórico-empírica en curso que sigue una estrategia metodológica cualitativa. Los resultados indican la productividad analítica de la lectura poscolonial en el estudio de las prácticas cotidianas, los sujetos y las demandas por derechos de la economía popular.