Description

Panel I: Imaginaries and Practices of Political and Economic Justice
Presenters: Noaman Ali, Jaby Mathew

Presentation 1: Noaman Ali
Department: Political Science

Title: Class struggle in between political society and civil society: peasants, land and democracy in northwestern Pakistan

Abstract:

Partha Chatterjee’s formulation of “political society” sees the extra-legal political engagement of subaltern communities as a form of democratic empowerment. Chatterjee’s formulation has justifiably been criticized for ignoring how class striates “communities” and results in unequal distribution of the benefits claimed through political society. A related line of criticism has focused on how elites solidify their privileges by acting extra-legally, while subaltern groups empower themselves through engagement with the rule of law and the institutions of the liberal state (i.e., through civil society). Examining peasant struggles over land in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, my paper challenges the dichotomy between political society and civil society. While richer peasants are often able to make use of the political and legal system (i.e., both political and civil society) to assert their occupation or even titles to land (among other benefits), poorer peasants are more systematically vulnerable to the depredations of landlords. Moreover, it is precisely the depredations of capital at the provincial and national levels, advanced through civil society, that make political society so perverse for all peasants and landless workers. The crucial factor here is not the rule of law and adherence to liberal proceduralism, but class power and class struggle. The conceptual and normative parameters of liberal democratic theory (whether “political” or “civil”), which rely on obscuring class struggle, need to be transcended in order to assess and advance the interests of subaltern groups.

Respondent: Katherine Rankin

Presenter 2: Jaby Mathew
Department: Political Science

Title: From History-Memory to Minority Rights: Conceptions of representing a “Distinctive Community” among Leaguers (1906-1936)

Abstract:

This paper is part of my dissertation work examining the available and possible normative justifications to redress the persistent under-representation of Muslims in post-independent Indian legislatures. Reading through the Muslim League documents between 1906 -1936, this paper argues that there are two different justificatory accounts offered by Leaguers for separate representation of/for “Indian Muslims,” both resting on the idea of a “distinctive community” with interests unique and un-representable by non-Muslims. The earlier positions articulated around Morley-Minto reforms drew from the political ideas of Sir Syed, and present also in the Address made by Simla Deputation to Viceroy Minto, resists the label of “minority” accorded to the community through colonial enumerative practices and notions of rights that may come along with it. Rather, the demand is framed in the language of recognition invoking a specific “history” – of ruler-ship, dominance and glory – and a “collective memory” of that history among “Indian Muslims.” This claim is supplemented by additional arguments; central among them is the argument of “socio-political weight” of the community for the empire based on numerical strength. By the time of the next set of reforms in 1919 the demands are couched in the liberal framework of right to minorities. But as opposed to western liberal idea of rights for minorities as protecting individuals, the League’s conceptualization of minority rights was for safeguarding a community and the shared interests and ethos of its members. This “cultural turn” opens avenues for an alternative version of liberalism emerging in the South Asian context. This paper attempts to examine these two justificatory frameworks as possibilities to think through contemporary claims to redress the issue of legislative under-representation of Muslims in contemporary India.

Respondent: Frank Cody

Panel II: Capital, Media and Globality
Presenters: Askhaya Tankha; Prasanta Dhar

Presenter 1: Akshaya Tankha
Department: Art History

Title: The image of culture and the cultures of images that prevail in Nagaland

Abstract:

2013 marked the 13th year that the Hornbill Festival was celebrated in Nagaland, a state in northeast India with a population that is 89% indigenous and predominantly Christian besides a postcolonial history of armed movements against the Indian state that have waged fractured battles for political autonomy since India gained independence in 1947. The image of ‘tribal culture’ has been central to India’s promotion of the region as a ‘land of festivals’ through events such as the annual Hornbill Festival, media campaigns, renovations to the state museum and the promotion of ‘tourist villages’ since the mid 1990s, when the country removed restrictions for a greater flow of global capital into an otherwise protected economy and signed a landmark ceasefire agreement with separatist factions. But an overt agreement to cease armed opposition has not ended the movements for political autonomy. Far from it, online forums and the local market place reveals a host of practices where the ‘image’ of culture remains central to alternative political imaginaries of Nagaland. Furthermore, the local consumption of popular culture reveals pre- and post globalization market enabled ways of ‘being Naga’ that depart from the normative image of the region as exclusively ‘tribal’. Based on a preliminary survey of the region, my paper will address some of the material, imagistic and performative ways in which local identitarian constructs operate alongside an increasingly dominant image of Nagaland as part of India’s cultural diversity, illustrating, expanding and challenging the encompassment associated with visual and cultural production under conditions of globalized capital.

Respondent: Meghan Sutherland

Presenter 2: Prasanta Dhar
Department: History

Title: Intimate Immateriality: Reading Marx’s Writings in India in the 1940s

Abstract:
Most of Marx’s own writings — including The German Ideology and Notes on Indian History — were not published till the 1930s. Over the next few decades, these ‘new’ books were read for and against classical Marxism, thereby generating debates across global sites. Thus, in the 1940s, Indian historians engaged in a debate on Marx’s writings on India. Some of them claimed that Marx did argue that British rule was bringing social revolution in India while others refuted that claim based on a reading of Marx’s Notes on Indian History. These critical Marxists also dismantled classical Marxist theories such as ‘historical materialism’. Their interventions fundamentally changed the mode of writing history of colonial India and planted the earliest seed of Subaltern Studies. Interestingly, however, these ‘new’ works of Marx, especially Notes on Indian History and The German Ideology, could not have been materially present in contemporary India, although they were being read politically fruitfully. Why was it necessary for the Marxists to ‘read’ these books that were not there? My paper historicizes this Marx-reading culture in India in the 1940s, showing how current methods in bibliography and textual criticism can effectively historicize the uneven political economy of global circulation of Marxism. However, the current theories in that field do not help us much to theorize such effective, yet unconventional, reading practices.

Respondent: Bhavani Raman