Africans in India

Camalita Naicker, The Con

I am an African. A South African Indian to be more precise. A few years ago, after much research and determination, my father, almost 60 years old at the time, managed to locate the indenture number of one of his maternal grandmothers. This identification number, given to indentured labourers who boarded ships to work in the sugarcane fields of the British colony of Natal in south-eastern Africa in the 1860s, allows one, who is lucky enough to find it, to trace the village where an ancestor came from, and the port at which she must have left her homeland. The village was in a rural area near Madras.

Nirbhaya film: Solidarity is what we want, not a civilising mission

Kavita Krishnan, Daily O

I am beset with a growing sense of unease at the global publicity campaign surrounding the release of a film by Leslee Udwin called India's Daughter. The film's subject is the December 16, 2012 Delhi gang rape and the movement that followed it. The film is to be released on March 8, and we can discuss it after we have seen it. But I would like to flag some concerns about the "Daughters of India" campaign that is due to be launched in the wake of the film, and about the response to the film in India.

Narendra Modi and the new face of India

Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian

In A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth writes with affection of a placid India's first general election in 1951, and the egalitarian spirit it momentarily bestowed on an electorate deeply riven by class and caste: "the great washed and unwashed public, sceptical and gullible", but all "endowed with universal adult suffrage". India's 16th general election this month, held against a background of economic jolts and titanic corruption scandals, and tainted by the nastiest campaign yet, announces a new turbulent phase for the country – arguably, the most sinister since its independence from British rule in 1947. Back then, it would have been inconceivable that a figure such as Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist chief minister of Gujarat accused, along with his closest aides, of complicity in crimes ranging from an anti-Muslim pogrom in his state in 2002 to extrajudicial killings, and barred from entering the US, may occupy India's highest political office.

Dumbo Democracies

Vashna Jagarnath, The Con

“… There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.”

 ― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

  

Had Frantz Fanon lived to see the candidates in our upcoming general elections, he would have had very little trouble proving correct his pessimism about the abundance of idiots in this world. The festival of idiocy that is relentlessly paraded on our screens during election season is not unique to our shores. Across the Indian Ocean the vast subcontinent of India is also in the throes of an election season, and, given its massive population, the accumulation of idiots on parade in India far exceeds those we have to confront day after day. As in South Africa, electoral politics in India, where the ballot paper at least carries a “None of the above” option, generally comes down to the predicament of having to decide which party is likely to be the lesser evil. The many wonderful aspects of India today, and there are many, have everything to do with its people and very little to do with its politicians.

Arundhati Roy Talks about Her New Book ‘Capitalism: A Ghost Story’

How Colonial India Made Modern Britain

: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain by TigersEye99

Six Theses on Waste, Value, and Commons

Vinay Gidwani: Six Theses on Waste, Value, and Commons by TigersEye99

Unfriendly Bodies, Hostile Cities: Reflections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space

Unfriendly Bodies, Hostile Cities: Reflections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space by TigersEye99

The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus

The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus by TigersEye99

On the Decline of Class Analysis in South Asian Studies

by Vivek Chibber, 2006

The decline of class analysis has been pervasive across the intellectual landscape in recent years. But South Asian studies stands out in the severity with which it has been hit by this phenomenon. It also is the field where the influence of post-structuralism has been most pronounced in the wake of Marxism’s decline. This essay offers an explanation for both the decline of class analysis and the ascendance of post-structuralism in South Asian studies as practiced in the United States. I suggest that the decline of class theorizing was a predictable and natural result of the decline of working-class politics in the United States. But the severity of its decline in South Asian studies in particular was a symptom of its never having made much of a dent on the field in the first place. This left unchallenged the traditional, Indological approach, which was heavily oriented toward culturalism. This in turn made the field a hospitable ground for the entrance of post-structuralism, which, like mainstream Indology, not only eschews materialist analysis, but is largely hostile to class. South Asian studies is thus one of the few fields in which traditional scholars and younger ones are both able to agree on their hostility to class analysis. Finally, I argue that the decline of class is now visible in Indian universities too, and this is largely caused by the overwhelming influence that U.S. universities have come to exercise over Indian elite academic culture.

Demolition Job

Postcolonial Theory &
the Specter of Capital

Rosinka Chaudhuri, The Indian Express

Book: Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

Author: Vivek Chibber

Publisher: Navayana

Price: Rs 450

Pages: 306

Vivek Chibber does not like the Subaltern Studies historians, and his mission in this book is to tear down the early theories of, in his order of importance, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee. What these historians have influentially said seems to him to be simply wrong-headed and methodologically dubious; his favourite descriptions of them here are as "cultural essentialists" and "Orientalists" (the latter without reference to Edward Said, who is mentioned only once on page eight). Culture, in fact, is a bad word for him in general, and one of his main objections to the Subalternists is the primacy they choose to give to cultural locations.

Sangtin Yatra: A short introduction

From Delhi to Bredasdorp

by Richard Pithouse, The Mercury & The Daily Dispatch

In December last year Jyoti Singh Pandey,  a student on the cusp of her adult life, stepped into a bus in Delhi. She was with a friend. They had been to see the film version of the Life of Pi and were on the way home. And then, without warning, their passage through the night suddenly dropped out of the flow of ordinary life and into hell.

The bus went off the expected route, the doors were closed and Jyoti's friend was beaten unconscious by the six men in the bus. In what sounds like a ritual performance of absolute domination and absolute sadism Joyti was raped and attacked with such violence that most of the entrails were ripped from her body.

Arundhati Roy on the Protests Against Rape in Delhi

The riotous underbelly of the new normal

by Richard Pithouse, The Daily Maverick

Here we are, almost 20 years after Apartheid and, from the prisons to the shack settlements and the farms, the riotous underbelly of our society is on television most nights. We’re not even a full month into the year and it’s been reported that the police have killed another protester in the Boland and, depending on which newspaper you read, three, four or six people in Zamdela in Sasolburg.

The new normal that we are being asked to accept after Mangaung has won consent in some quarters by replacing a demagogic populist with an oligarch and putting an end to the discussion about nationalisation.  Its basic logic – crony capitalism greased with corruption, wrapped in an escalating conflation of both the nation and the state with the ruling party and defended with growing authoritarianism – can work well enough for capital. In fact international capital often finds authoritarian states to be its most attractive destinations for investment. And it’s not unusual for the middle classes to be quite comfortable with forms of authoritarianism that restrict the basic democratic rights of the popular classes in defence of the domination of society by an alliance between business and political elites – after all, just look at how many South Africans think Dubai is a great place to live.

After Being Raped, I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn't

By SOHAILA ABDULALI, The New York Times

Published: January 08, 2013

THIRTY-THREE years ago, when I was 17 and living in Bombay, I was gang raped and nearly killed. Three years later, outraged at the silence and misconceptions around rape, I wrote a fiery essay under my own name describing my experience for an Indian women's magazine. It created a stir in the women's movement - and in my family - and then it quietly disappeared. Then, last week, I looked at my e-mail and there it was. As part of the outpouring of public rage after a young woman's rape and death in Delhi, somebody posted the article online and it went viral. Since then, I have received a deluge of messages from people expressing their support.

Fanon: Imperative of the Now (Special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on Fanon)

Fanon: Imperative of the Now

Volume 112, Number 1, Winter 2013Grant Farred, Special Issue Editor

Articles

• • Grant Farred

  Imperative of the Now

  South Atlantic Quarterly (2013) 112(1): 1-4; doi:10.1215/00382876-1900549
  • Full Text (PDF)
   
  • References
• Select this article
  • John E. Drabinski

  Fanon’s Two Memories

  South Atlantic Quarterly (2013) 112(1): 5-22; doi:10.1215/00382876-1891206
  • Abstract
   
  • Full Text (PDF)
   
  • References

Unlearning submission

by Neha Dixit, Kafila

In the last fortnight, we unlearned submission. On December 16, a 23 year old girl, just on the brink of leading a socio-economically independent life was raped in a moving bus at 9.30 at night.

We saw protests, we saw outraged masses. It is the first time in the history of this nation, when people were out on the streets on the issue of gender. For more than two weeks in a row. And it continues. Figures have been thrown at us: every 20 minutes a woman is raped in India, every third victim is a child, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

On Rape and Neocolonialism

by JULIAN VIGO, CounterPunch

“Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.”

― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

In the United Kingdom 400,000 women are sexually assaulted and 80,000 are raped each year (2010/2011).  These statistics do not include rape victims who are male, whose aggressors are both male and female.  The population of the United Kingdom is 20 times smaller of India’s population.  Yet living in the UK and reading its media, one could easily think that rape solely existed in India and that there is only injustice against women in the subcontinent and other ‘developing countries.’  During the past week I have had many conversations with friends and colleagues about the twenty-three-year-old rape victim, now nick-named ‘Damani’ (lighting in Hindi). A few of these discussions have proven to be productive terrains for analysing rape as a social problem in the world today. However the majority of these discussions have served as cathartic moments for the Westerner to express her disdain for those ‘other countries that do not respect women’s rights’ while proclaiming her own country’s superiority in this area. Facebook comments as well have replicated this neo-colonial gaze towards other countries and in recent days India has been rendered a monolith in human rights abuses; yet the country in which I am currently living has aided my own country (the USA) to amass over 1,000,000 Iraqi, Afghani and Pakistani deaths. (Of course, nothing is mentioned about these women’s rights to live in these countries.)  As such, I am gravely concerned by the focus placed by Westerners upon rape outside of their own borders since rape is not a problem unique to India.  Violence against women is a global problem that needs to be discussed honestly and without pigeon-holing certain cultures as more culpable.

Arundhati Roy et al: Reading Nandigram Wrongly

Reading Nandigram Wrongly by TigersEye99