Subnational Discourse as Counter Imagination in Esther Syiem's "To the Rest of India from Another Indian": Towards a Confederal Political Assumption

Abstract:This paper posits that Esther Syiem's poem, "To the Rest of India from Another Indian" (2013) engenders a subnational discourse that, by interrogating the national status of a privileged pedagogy, opts for a confederal political imagination of multiple and equal centers. It fosters this desire by modulating a counter imagination in two strategic ways—foregroundong its strangeness and implanting its own subnational pedagogy which constitutes its imagination. The subnational discourse, then, homogenizes the national imagination, and sets it in binary opposition to the modulated counter imagination which is also homogenized. It proceeds, after setting up a binary opposition, to contradict, delimit, and alienate itself in order to be recognized as another authentic and central entity parallel to the pedagogy that is deemed to be national. This paper concludes that Syiem's subnational discourse, considered as a form of minority discourse, goes against the grain of Homi K. Bhabha's view of minority discourse.