Studies in Indian Politics最新文献

{"title":"Beyond the Identitarian Deadlock: Why Mobile Methods Are Useful for Studying Media in Zones of Conflict","authors":"Max Kramer","doi":"10.1177/23210230221135822","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221135822","url":null,"abstract":"We begin with a problem.2 It is something that pressures us to arrive at questions, methods, and concepts. The problem that I have been dealing with for some years now is how filmmakers make sense of audiovisual testimony in zones of conflict, in non-identitarian ways.3 ‘Making sense’ refers to the film form as it engages with a sensorium in which feelings can be created and negotiated. In saying ‘identitarian’, I speak of the ways that conflict parties apply fixed categories of cultural identity to archived, readymade facts (Udupa, 2016), in the sensorial field of what media scholar Ravi Sundaram calls a ‘crisis machine’ (Sundaram, 2020). This crisis machine circulates testimonial images as political stimuli from one media-event to the next. In doing so, it enables affective energies to be appropriated by the Hindu right. The crisis machine refers to synergies between a new phase of Hindu nationalist dominance in the media-sphere and dispersed post-Fordism (to borrow a term from Pothik Ghosh4), the current form of capitalism that fragments time-space and subjectivities while drawing on the cognitive and affective capabilities of human beings. In fact, the term identitarian does not have much to do with the theories and practices that go under the name of identity politics (see the debate in Bohrer [2019], Dean [1996], Haider [2018] and Táíwò [2022]). The identitarian capture works in the service of moral outrage and is most effectively mobilized from the far right in what are called information wars. The fallout is that egalitarian forms of political belonging become increasingly difficult to feel and articulate. My research focuses on practices of witnessing at work in the form of documentary film in zones of intractable conflicts (Bar-Tal, 2013). In these zones, dynamics of identitarian capture become exacerbated by a politics of victimhood (Bar-Tal, 2013; Datta, 2020) and also by the hypervisibility of a set number of tropes through which conflict zones are imagined. Within dispersed Post-Fordism human interactions","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43052934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nehru’s Elephant Envoys: Animal Modernity, Orientalist Gaze and India’s Soft Power","authors":"Aryama Ghosh","doi":"10.1177/23210230221135839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221135839","url":null,"abstract":"The colonial masters classified Indian subjects according to animalistic iconographies of rebel tiger or docile elephant. Even prior to the colonial imaginings, orientalist gaze associated elephant with the Indian geographical imagery. After decolonization, due to circumstantial necessities India, one of the biggest elephant suppliers to Europe, started to gift elephants to war-stricken zoos not as merchandize but as envoys of peace and goodwill. This subverted the long tradition of environmental domination. This article argues that Nehru’s elephant gift diplomacy utilized the long-standing orientalist iconography to practise India’s soft power. Apart from that he successfully incorporated a colonial icon and rebranded it as nation’s diplomatic emblem.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43422688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"State and Nation: Shall the Twain Ever Meet?","authors":"Partha Chatterjee","doi":"10.1177/23210230221135825","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221135825","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces the separate trajectories of the Indian state and the Indian nation since independence. The state machinery, largely inherited from colonial times, retained its imperial character, which facilitated the integration of the princely states. The negotiated transfer of power also created the myth that the state was prior to the nation whose sovereign people gave itself a new constitution. The Indian nation, on the other hand, was imagined differently in each regional language. Thus, while there was certainly the concept of an Indian nation, it looked different from each linguistic perspective. Further, the idea of the Indian nation was also contested in each region. This article surveys the political process by which these two trajectories were sought to be united, first in the period of Congress dominance until 1967, then under the authoritarian leadership of Indira Gandhi, followed by the relative loosening of the federal structure in the 1990s, and culminating in the present attempt to impose the Hindu majoritarian conception of the nation, nurtured in particular in the Hindi language, on the Indian nation state. Looking at the forces that oppose this hegemonic attempt, the article argues that only a genuinely federal conception of the nation in which each part is given equal respect can effectively challenge Hindutva hegemony.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41906196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching International Relations in Indian Universities: Issues and Challenges","authors":"Sudhir Kumar Suthar, Shailza Singh","doi":"10.1177/23210230221135830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221135830","url":null,"abstract":"Globally, it is in the recent past that the concerns for pedagogy in international relations (IR) have gained a new momentum despite the study of the discipline being more than a century old. Teaching–learning IR in India is also in an urgent need of one. Recently, much attention is drawn towards the necessity of greater theoretical rigour in Indian scholarship on IR to match global standards and her increasing visibility as an emerging power on the global scene (Paul, 2017). While the appeal of IR as a discipline is increasing among students at the undergraduate, post-graduate and research levels, evolving a robust pedagogy that encapsulates the relevance of the discipline to students from the vantage point of this part of the world is a challenge that teachers imparting knowledge about IR in India constantly struggle with. For long, the syllabi at the undergraduate level in various universities across the country did not touch upon the theoretical aspects at all (Bajpai & Mallavarappu, 2005), confining the focus to Cold War history and foreign policy. Introduction to theories and theoretical engagement with problems and issues in IR only took place at the post-graduate level in universities such as Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), University of Delhi (DU)3, Jadavpur University and in South Asian University (SAU) in the recent past. While JNU has an entire school dedicated to the study of IR (including programmes on area studies, international economy and trade), DU offered only a couple of papers in the master’s programme as subdiscipline of political science. The SAU also has a department dedicated to IR. With successive syllabus revision exercises in DU, the IR courses have been invested with rich theoretical content, and also the number of papers associated with relevant themes in IR has been significantly increased. However, the pedagogical concerns still loom large. How to navigate through the challenge of not making the discipline look like something which makes more sense from a Western lens only, where concerns that affect the post-colonial/global south/developing countries/non-Western countries, either Teaching–Learning Politics in India","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47014344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book review: Akhil Ranjan Dutta, Hindutva Regime in Assam: Saffron in the Rainbow and Nani Gopal Mahanta, Citizenship Debate over NRC & CAA: Assam and the Politics of History","authors":"Papia Sengupta","doi":"10.1177/23210230221135819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221135819","url":null,"abstract":"Akhil Ranjan Dutta, Hindutva Regime in Assam: Saffron in the Rainbow. SAGE Publications. 2021. 329 pages. ₹1295. ISBN: 9789391370411. Nani Gopal Mahanta, Citizenship Debate over NRC & CAA: Assam and the Politics of History. SAGE Publications. 2021. 326 pages. ₹1395. ISBN: 9789391370299.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47318549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book review: Koushiki Dasgupta, Sadhus in Indian Politics: Dynamics of Hindutva","authors":"Shashank Chaturvedi","doi":"10.1177/23210230221135824","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221135824","url":null,"abstract":"Koushiki Dasgupta, Sadhus in Indian Politics: Dynamics of Hindutva. New Delhi: SAGE Publications. 2021. 284 pages. ₹847. ISBN: 9789391370961.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47689576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book review: Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy","authors":"A. Chakrabarti","doi":"10.1177/23210230221135821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221135821","url":null,"abstract":"Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy. India: Permanent Black. 2021. 260 pages. ₹795. ISBN: 9788178246451.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49254947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Politics of Knowledge of Medicinal Plants in India: Corporations, Collectors and Cultivators as Constituents","authors":"A. Handa","doi":"10.1177/23210230221083244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221083244","url":null,"abstract":"This article seeks to understand one of the most important problems in the contemporary discourse of modern development, that of management, control, collection and trade of medicinal plants in India. The tremendous growth in the market for herbal medicines since the 1990s has prompted large-scale industrial production of these medicines by big pharmaceutical corporations. This relies on medicinal plants mostly derived from the wild, and while their market has grown enormously, it has also led to their over-harvesting, without any concomitant efforts at regeneration. This article offers to analyse the political aspect of the existing market supply chain of medicinal plants in India. This study specifically focuses on problematizing the complex power structures in the market supply chain of medicinal plants, with reference to the knowledge of production that guides the corporations. In order to manufacture herbal products on the basis of large-scale centralized production systems, the corporations privilege their ‘knowledge’ of harvesting, production and distribution over that of the collectors. The collectors are usually part of communities that have built up their knowledge of accessibility and medicinal properties of these medicinal plants over centuries of care, experience and innovation. It is when these two knowledge systems clash, in the larger context of political economy of development and the public policies of the state, that the degradation of nature becomes inevitable.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42057859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book review: Bidyut Chakrabarty and Rajendra Kumar Pandey, Reconceptualizing Indian Democracy: The Changing Electorate","authors":"Radhika Kumar","doi":"10.1177/23210230221082829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221082829","url":null,"abstract":"Bidyut Chakrabarty and Rajendra Kumar Pandey, Reconceptualizing Indian Democracy: The Changing Electorate (New Delhi: SAGE, 2020), 258 pp., ₹1,050.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41380803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hindu Nationalism: From Ethnic Identity to Authoritarian Repression","authors":"P. Mehta","doi":"10.1177/23210230221082828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221082828","url":null,"abstract":"This article reflects on the relationship between Hindu nationalism and democracy and how the former emerges from within democracy only to subvert it. The essay outlines important conceptual issues in the relationship between Hindu nationalism and democracy, discusses the relationship between the idea of a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ and ‘Hindu Rajya’, and delves into the complex interplay between Hindu nationalism and caste. This article ultimately argues that Hindu nationalism’s alignment with authoritarianism in a political style does not simply corrode democracy, but it also undermines all values. The objective of this analysis is not to provide a comprehensive explanation of the rise of Hindu nationalism, as much as to reflect on the ways in which its ideology operates at multiple levels.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43493641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}