Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1080/14736489.2021.2018200
Rochana Bajpai, Lawrence Sáez
ABSTRACT Politicians winning elections with large margins of victory, beyond what is necessary to win electoral contests,what we term “winning big”, is a common, yet under-studied phenomenon across the world. Political economy models suggest that winning big is not an optimal allocation of scarce campaign resources in a SMP/FPTP electoral system. Inductive inquiry shows that incumbent politicians likely to win nevertheless campaign hard, often devoting considerable effort and resources, for reasons that remain unexamined. Focusing on India, this article explores a range of reasons that can help explain this phenomenon through an innovative research design that combines quantitative analysis with in-depth elite interviews with incumbent MPs from 10 states. We distinguish the phenomenon of “winning big” from that of “safe” seats,identify and probe factors that can contribute to large margins, including candidate strategy, party popularity, mobilizers, electoral uncertainty, and party control . Our findings suggest that while political parties in India, as elsewhere, do not spend more money on electoral contests that they likely to win comfortably, winning big can be the result, among other factors, of a party strategy to establish a reputation for invincibility, and/or individual efforts, stemming from a sense of political vulnerability felt by politicians, underestimated in the literature on safe seats.
{"title":"Winning big: The political logic of winning elections with large margins in India","authors":"Rochana Bajpai, Lawrence Sáez","doi":"10.1080/14736489.2021.2018200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2021.2018200","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Politicians winning elections with large margins of victory, beyond what is necessary to win electoral contests,what we term “winning big”, is a common, yet under-studied phenomenon across the world. Political economy models suggest that winning big is not an optimal allocation of scarce campaign resources in a SMP/FPTP electoral system. Inductive inquiry shows that incumbent politicians likely to win nevertheless campaign hard, often devoting considerable effort and resources, for reasons that remain unexamined. Focusing on India, this article explores a range of reasons that can help explain this phenomenon through an innovative research design that combines quantitative analysis with in-depth elite interviews with incumbent MPs from 10 states. We distinguish the phenomenon of “winning big” from that of “safe” seats,identify and probe factors that can contribute to large margins, including candidate strategy, party popularity, mobilizers, electoral uncertainty, and party control . Our findings suggest that while political parties in India, as elsewhere, do not spend more money on electoral contests that they likely to win comfortably, winning big can be the result, among other factors, of a party strategy to establish a reputation for invincibility, and/or individual efforts, stemming from a sense of political vulnerability felt by politicians, underestimated in the literature on safe seats.","PeriodicalId":56338,"journal":{"name":"India Review","volume":"21 1","pages":"21 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43051465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1080/14736489.2021.2018202
Ashwath Komath
ABSTRACT This article looks into international cooperation based on shared religious solidarity; its causative factors, and how it influences relations between states. To demonstrate its effects in actual practice, this article examines the case study of the decision of the Indian government to revoke the special status of Kashmir in 2019, which prompted criticism by a few states, specifically Turkey and Malaysia, and also examines the role of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The article engages with the reasons for these states to engage in criticism of the Indian government’s decision and explores the influence of religious solidarity, especially Islamic solidarity in their rebukes against India, and also briefly deals with the implications such moves may have on a state’s foreign policy calculus.
{"title":"The Kashmir Litmus test: an examination of international Islamic solidarity and co-operation","authors":"Ashwath Komath","doi":"10.1080/14736489.2021.2018202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2021.2018202","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article looks into international cooperation based on shared religious solidarity; its causative factors, and how it influences relations between states. To demonstrate its effects in actual practice, this article examines the case study of the decision of the Indian government to revoke the special status of Kashmir in 2019, which prompted criticism by a few states, specifically Turkey and Malaysia, and also examines the role of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The article engages with the reasons for these states to engage in criticism of the Indian government’s decision and explores the influence of religious solidarity, especially Islamic solidarity in their rebukes against India, and also briefly deals with the implications such moves may have on a state’s foreign policy calculus.","PeriodicalId":56338,"journal":{"name":"India Review","volume":"21 1","pages":"53 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42347728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1080/14736489.2021.2018203
K. Anand, Marie Lall
ABSTRACT Schools and textbooks are significant mediums for the transmission of political ideas. Textbooks therefore reflect the ideology of the day whilst imparting values, goals, and myths to younger generations. This article provides an insight into the nexus between politics, the state, the social contract, and school textbooks in India. It critically highlights the ways in which the discourses of political parties of the (national) Self and Other are invoked and reflected in school textbooks underpinning the parties’ versions of national identity and transmit their wider political messages, with devastating results on the debates about Indian citizenship. There is a clear link between changing political parties at the helm of national and state governments and which school textbooks are in use. The article reviews the textbook politics between 1998 and 2020, focusing in particular on how the present BJP-led government has appointed Hindutva-minded scholars to lead education institutions underpinning the message of India being a Hindu nation. The right wing RSS has been allowed by the Narendra Modi government to influence the formulation of the National Education Policy 2020 as well as suggesting changes to textbooks to push the national discourse of citizenship defined by Hindutva at the Union and State levels. The article adds, theoretically and substantively, to the specific link between education and the current issues of Indian citizenship as the government tries to change the values of India’s constitution. Not many in this generation of Indians think this is abnormal, as this reflects what they have learnt at school and historically been used to shape the hostile mind-set of new generations vis-à-vis their neighbors, and other religious communities. The article evaluates how over the last two decades textbooks of the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) interpret government policy objectives and guidelines to depict Indian national identity, internal ethnic and cultural diversity, and citizenship.
{"title":"The debate between secularism and Hindu nationalism – how India’s textbooks have become the government’s medium for political communication","authors":"K. Anand, Marie Lall","doi":"10.1080/14736489.2021.2018203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2021.2018203","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Schools and textbooks are significant mediums for the transmission of political ideas. Textbooks therefore reflect the ideology of the day whilst imparting values, goals, and myths to younger generations. This article provides an insight into the nexus between politics, the state, the social contract, and school textbooks in India. It critically highlights the ways in which the discourses of political parties of the (national) Self and Other are invoked and reflected in school textbooks underpinning the parties’ versions of national identity and transmit their wider political messages, with devastating results on the debates about Indian citizenship. There is a clear link between changing political parties at the helm of national and state governments and which school textbooks are in use. The article reviews the textbook politics between 1998 and 2020, focusing in particular on how the present BJP-led government has appointed Hindutva-minded scholars to lead education institutions underpinning the message of India being a Hindu nation. The right wing RSS has been allowed by the Narendra Modi government to influence the formulation of the National Education Policy 2020 as well as suggesting changes to textbooks to push the national discourse of citizenship defined by Hindutva at the Union and State levels. The article adds, theoretically and substantively, to the specific link between education and the current issues of Indian citizenship as the government tries to change the values of India’s constitution. Not many in this generation of Indians think this is abnormal, as this reflects what they have learnt at school and historically been used to shape the hostile mind-set of new generations vis-à-vis their neighbors, and other religious communities. The article evaluates how over the last two decades textbooks of the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) interpret government policy objectives and guidelines to depict Indian national identity, internal ethnic and cultural diversity, and citizenship.","PeriodicalId":56338,"journal":{"name":"India Review","volume":"246 ","pages":"77 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41284829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1080/14736489.2021.2018201
Ilyas Chattha
ABSTRACT The communalization of the police, which resulted from the embittered political situation among the rival communities, was a prominent feature of the Partition violence in 1947. Instead of safeguarding minority communities under attack, the police largely condoned and contributed to the violence, not because of sympathies with their coreligionists, but because they could act with impunity in an environment of insubordination and administrative breakdown in the process of the transition of power of the outgoing British colonial state. This article will show that the absence of a restraining authority, impunity from the law at the point of transitional state-created conditions of violence and the participation of law enforcement agencies led to the widespread violence. This documentation is done by accessing previously unexplored police First Information Reports (FIRs) lodged at local police stations at the time, and the reports of the Punjab Special Branch Intelligence Police from the Roberts Club Archives (RCA), Lahore. The analysis not only contributes to recent scholarship that focuses on the ‘new history’ of Partition studies but also provides an intriguing insight into the role of law enforcement agencies in mass violence.
{"title":"Communalized force: the 1947 partition violence in Punjab and role of law enforcers","authors":"Ilyas Chattha","doi":"10.1080/14736489.2021.2018201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2021.2018201","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The communalization of the police, which resulted from the embittered political situation among the rival communities, was a prominent feature of the Partition violence in 1947. Instead of safeguarding minority communities under attack, the police largely condoned and contributed to the violence, not because of sympathies with their coreligionists, but because they could act with impunity in an environment of insubordination and administrative breakdown in the process of the transition of power of the outgoing British colonial state. This article will show that the absence of a restraining authority, impunity from the law at the point of transitional state-created conditions of violence and the participation of law enforcement agencies led to the widespread violence. This documentation is done by accessing previously unexplored police First Information Reports (FIRs) lodged at local police stations at the time, and the reports of the Punjab Special Branch Intelligence Police from the Roberts Club Archives (RCA), Lahore. The analysis not only contributes to recent scholarship that focuses on the ‘new history’ of Partition studies but also provides an intriguing insight into the role of law enforcement agencies in mass violence.","PeriodicalId":56338,"journal":{"name":"India Review","volume":"21 1","pages":"1 - 20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45404493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-20DOI: 10.1080/14736489.2021.1993709
Isha Dubey
ABSTRACT The “cultural turn” in memory studies acknowledges that collective memory has a distinctive social aspect reflected in the manner in which it is communicated orally from one individual or generation to another. However, the point of departure is the emphasis on the need to account for the fact that memory is, in equal measure, shaped and mediated by tangible channels such as texts, images, objects, rituals, buildings and so on. The interactions and intersections between these two strands of approaching collective memory have been employed to write the most human and engaging histories of trauma and displacement – especially in the context of the Holocaust. This article takes this discussion forward by critically looking at the scope of the field of memory studies – with its largely Western frames of reference – to facilitate a deeper understanding of similar engagements and entanglements between communicative and culturally tangible forms of collective memory in South Asia. It looks at the ways in which the dominant discourse of nationalism is constructed and contested through the politics inherent in memorialization and memory in the South Asian context by comparing the partition of 1947 that resulted in the creation of Pakistan and the Liberation War of 1971 which gave birth to Bangladesh. Through a review of some important recent works of scholarship on the long, complex and intertwined afterlife of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, this article shows how the processes of the construction and contestation of a dominant discourse of nationalism and nationhood are fraught with their own forms of remembrance and forgetting. And yet they speak in a language of exceptionalism that mirrors a somewhat universal template for remembering “difficult pasts” characteristic of the memorial landscape of the Holocaust. Finally, it is argued that the interstices of “national memory” contain voices that unsettle or counter it. Acknowledging these voices while also recognizing their own memory politics shall broaden and nuance the dominant modes of memorializing the partition and the Liberation War in a way that better reflects the specificities and complexities of their context.
{"title":"Remembering, forgetting and memorialising: 1947, 1971 and the state of memory studies in South Asia","authors":"Isha Dubey","doi":"10.1080/14736489.2021.1993709","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2021.1993709","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The “cultural turn” in memory studies acknowledges that collective memory has a distinctive social aspect reflected in the manner in which it is communicated orally from one individual or generation to another. However, the point of departure is the emphasis on the need to account for the fact that memory is, in equal measure, shaped and mediated by tangible channels such as texts, images, objects, rituals, buildings and so on. The interactions and intersections between these two strands of approaching collective memory have been employed to write the most human and engaging histories of trauma and displacement – especially in the context of the Holocaust. This article takes this discussion forward by critically looking at the scope of the field of memory studies – with its largely Western frames of reference – to facilitate a deeper understanding of similar engagements and entanglements between communicative and culturally tangible forms of collective memory in South Asia. It looks at the ways in which the dominant discourse of nationalism is constructed and contested through the politics inherent in memorialization and memory in the South Asian context by comparing the partition of 1947 that resulted in the creation of Pakistan and the Liberation War of 1971 which gave birth to Bangladesh. Through a review of some important recent works of scholarship on the long, complex and intertwined afterlife of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, this article shows how the processes of the construction and contestation of a dominant discourse of nationalism and nationhood are fraught with their own forms of remembrance and forgetting. And yet they speak in a language of exceptionalism that mirrors a somewhat universal template for remembering “difficult pasts” characteristic of the memorial landscape of the Holocaust. Finally, it is argued that the interstices of “national memory” contain voices that unsettle or counter it. Acknowledging these voices while also recognizing their own memory politics shall broaden and nuance the dominant modes of memorializing the partition and the Liberation War in a way that better reflects the specificities and complexities of their context.","PeriodicalId":56338,"journal":{"name":"India Review","volume":"20 1","pages":"510 - 539"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43734178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-20DOI: 10.1080/14736489.2021.1993710
Nimmi Kurian, Jayashree Vivekanandan
ABSTRACT The article looks at British India’s Burma campaign of 1941–45 and asks why the decisive battles of Imphal and Kohima appear to be virtually invisible from India’s national imagination today. It further critiques dominant readings of the twin battles for their failure to accommodate the heterogeneity of experiences and contributions of the hill tribes of the India-Burma borderlands who fought in it. The omission appears even more intriguing given that despite being on the winning side, the border communities end up losing the memory battle. While it questions the conventional notion that memory is the postcolonial state’s prerogative, it also recognizes that counter-memories are by no means monolithic. It makes the case for acknowledging alternative constructions and communities of practice that imaginatively decenter the construction of memory in the borderlands. Without connecting with the lives, and in turn, the memories of the border communities who inhabit the physical sites of the war, the cliché of the “forgotten war” will remain an overused, and ultimately, an offensive trope.
{"title":"Victorious outliers: India’s border regions and the contested memory politics of the Burma campaign","authors":"Nimmi Kurian, Jayashree Vivekanandan","doi":"10.1080/14736489.2021.1993710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2021.1993710","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article looks at British India’s Burma campaign of 1941–45 and asks why the decisive battles of Imphal and Kohima appear to be virtually invisible from India’s national imagination today. It further critiques dominant readings of the twin battles for their failure to accommodate the heterogeneity of experiences and contributions of the hill tribes of the India-Burma borderlands who fought in it. The omission appears even more intriguing given that despite being on the winning side, the border communities end up losing the memory battle. While it questions the conventional notion that memory is the postcolonial state’s prerogative, it also recognizes that counter-memories are by no means monolithic. It makes the case for acknowledging alternative constructions and communities of practice that imaginatively decenter the construction of memory in the borderlands. Without connecting with the lives, and in turn, the memories of the border communities who inhabit the physical sites of the war, the cliché of the “forgotten war” will remain an overused, and ultimately, an offensive trope.","PeriodicalId":56338,"journal":{"name":"India Review","volume":"20 1","pages":"497 - 509"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48785670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-20DOI: 10.1080/14736489.2021.1993708
Manu Sharma
ABSTRACT Postage stamps are a significant visual text of an issuing state. In 1947, British India was divided into independent states of India and Pakistan. The successive new regimes in both countries got the freedom to design, print, and circulate the official visual iconography through postage stamps as a symbol of sovereignty for its citizens and the world community. This article explores how India and Pakistan visualized the narrative of national identity and discourse on development through postage stamps in the first two decades of their independence. The article does not intend to retell the narrative of the postcolonial nation-building process in the subcontinent. Instead, the objective is to introduce postage stamps as a primary visual resource for exploring the contours of public history of India and Pakistan by arguing that stamps retain its importance as excellent visual archives for postcolonial scholarly analysis in the age of new media.
{"title":"Postage stamps as sites of public history in South Asia: an intervention","authors":"Manu Sharma","doi":"10.1080/14736489.2021.1993708","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2021.1993708","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Postage stamps are a significant visual text of an issuing state. In 1947, British India was divided into independent states of India and Pakistan. The successive new regimes in both countries got the freedom to design, print, and circulate the official visual iconography through postage stamps as a symbol of sovereignty for its citizens and the world community. This article explores how India and Pakistan visualized the narrative of national identity and discourse on development through postage stamps in the first two decades of their independence. The article does not intend to retell the narrative of the postcolonial nation-building process in the subcontinent. Instead, the objective is to introduce postage stamps as a primary visual resource for exploring the contours of public history of India and Pakistan by arguing that stamps retain its importance as excellent visual archives for postcolonial scholarly analysis in the age of new media.","PeriodicalId":56338,"journal":{"name":"India Review","volume":"20 1","pages":"540 - 564"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42928146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-20DOI: 10.1080/14736489.2021.1993711
K. Greenbank
ABSTRACT In 2005 Rev. Michael Roden, the vicar at Church of England church of St Mary’s in Hitchin (a small town about 30 miles north of London) was invited to India to give a series of sermons to Indian Church of England congregations. He was struck during his visit by the scars in Indian society that he thought were the remnants of Partition’s aftermath. His visit set him thinking about the ways in which Partition has shaped British as well as Indian and Pakistani society, and about how little people in the UK know about the calamitous results of British policy at the time of decolonization. In particular, he wondered about why it was the case that Partition had never been taught in schools in the UK, and why children were coming out of school with no understanding of the forces which had created a multi-cultural society in the UK over the course of the twentieth century. Reverend Roden contacted the University of Cambridge’s Centre of South Asian Studies and set in train a series of events that would lead to Partition being included in the curriculum of all Church of England schools in England and Wales. This process was to engage politicians, academics, playwrights, television companies and members of the general public. It would lead to more than teaching in the classroom – a swathe of television documentaries, for example, were broadcast around he 70th anniversary of Partition in 2017, providing information about a part of the shared UK/South Asian past which has been largely neglected in Britain. Alongside this process, the Centre of South Asian Studies also prepared an exhibition of materials from its own archive collections which ran from August 2017 and drew in thousands of visitors. This paper will examine the ways in which the process of presenting Partition to the people of the UK was fashioned and followed, and the nature of the output which resulted from it, looking at the ways in which academe can interact with public opinion and public knowledge in meaningful and positive ways.
{"title":"Representing partition in the UK: an archive, an exhibition and a classroom","authors":"K. Greenbank","doi":"10.1080/14736489.2021.1993711","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2021.1993711","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In 2005 Rev. Michael Roden, the vicar at Church of England church of St Mary’s in Hitchin (a small town about 30 miles north of London) was invited to India to give a series of sermons to Indian Church of England congregations. He was struck during his visit by the scars in Indian society that he thought were the remnants of Partition’s aftermath. His visit set him thinking about the ways in which Partition has shaped British as well as Indian and Pakistani society, and about how little people in the UK know about the calamitous results of British policy at the time of decolonization. In particular, he wondered about why it was the case that Partition had never been taught in schools in the UK, and why children were coming out of school with no understanding of the forces which had created a multi-cultural society in the UK over the course of the twentieth century. Reverend Roden contacted the University of Cambridge’s Centre of South Asian Studies and set in train a series of events that would lead to Partition being included in the curriculum of all Church of England schools in England and Wales. This process was to engage politicians, academics, playwrights, television companies and members of the general public. It would lead to more than teaching in the classroom – a swathe of television documentaries, for example, were broadcast around he 70th anniversary of Partition in 2017, providing information about a part of the shared UK/South Asian past which has been largely neglected in Britain. Alongside this process, the Centre of South Asian Studies also prepared an exhibition of materials from its own archive collections which ran from August 2017 and drew in thousands of visitors. This paper will examine the ways in which the process of presenting Partition to the people of the UK was fashioned and followed, and the nature of the output which resulted from it, looking at the ways in which academe can interact with public opinion and public knowledge in meaningful and positive ways.","PeriodicalId":56338,"journal":{"name":"India Review","volume":"20 1","pages":"589 - 609"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43815169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-20DOI: 10.1080/14736489.2021.1996120
Jayashree Vivekanandan
Postcolonialism has proven to be a fertile ground for interdisciplinary enquiries into the loci of power and agents of change. It has provoked intellectuals to ask probing questions about the exclusions, disparities and invisibilities they detect as pervading international politics, both elite and everyday. This sensibility has informed analyses that examined imperial associations with globalization, identity, memory, development, and indeed, with the international itself, among other issues. This distinctive aspect about its orientation—an abiding interest in drawing continuities between the past and the present—invariably brought historical depth into postcolonial formulations, even as these reopen history itself to critical scrutiny. In doing so, postcolonialism has prompted a richly textured engagement of International Relations (hereby IR) with history that has not only examined macro-historical processes but micro-histories as well. They bring out how elite politics intersected with the ordinary and the everyday, thereby constituting individual and collective memory. Postcolonial theory shared this emphasis on socially situated analysis with other post-positivist approaches in IR. From the 1980s onwards, and steadily picking up pace ever since, critical approaches such as non-Western IR, postmodernism and feminism have questioned structural power and the role IR as a discipline has played in legitimizing it. Consequently, we witness a continued engagement with issues concerning marginalized identities, structural violence and discriminatory practices. Such normative positioning has, expectedly, disturbed traditional typologies that inform order as we know it and which, willy-nilly, regard dominance to be a function of such order. Traditional IR’s preoccupation with great power politics, and the claims of Western scholarship to universality (and hence, to superiority) are regarded as reflecting this bias. Given how wary critical IR is of authoritative claims to (universal) truth, it is no surprise that it employs a diverse range of epistemes. Postcolonialism, in seeking to represent the unique historical experiences of the non-Western INDIA REVIEW 2021, VOL. 20, NO. 5, 483–496 https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2021.1996120
{"title":"Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Chronicling the Histories of India: The Politics of Remembrance and Commemoration’","authors":"Jayashree Vivekanandan","doi":"10.1080/14736489.2021.1996120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2021.1996120","url":null,"abstract":"Postcolonialism has proven to be a fertile ground for interdisciplinary enquiries into the loci of power and agents of change. It has provoked intellectuals to ask probing questions about the exclusions, disparities and invisibilities they detect as pervading international politics, both elite and everyday. This sensibility has informed analyses that examined imperial associations with globalization, identity, memory, development, and indeed, with the international itself, among other issues. This distinctive aspect about its orientation—an abiding interest in drawing continuities between the past and the present—invariably brought historical depth into postcolonial formulations, even as these reopen history itself to critical scrutiny. In doing so, postcolonialism has prompted a richly textured engagement of International Relations (hereby IR) with history that has not only examined macro-historical processes but micro-histories as well. They bring out how elite politics intersected with the ordinary and the everyday, thereby constituting individual and collective memory. Postcolonial theory shared this emphasis on socially situated analysis with other post-positivist approaches in IR. From the 1980s onwards, and steadily picking up pace ever since, critical approaches such as non-Western IR, postmodernism and feminism have questioned structural power and the role IR as a discipline has played in legitimizing it. Consequently, we witness a continued engagement with issues concerning marginalized identities, structural violence and discriminatory practices. Such normative positioning has, expectedly, disturbed traditional typologies that inform order as we know it and which, willy-nilly, regard dominance to be a function of such order. Traditional IR’s preoccupation with great power politics, and the claims of Western scholarship to universality (and hence, to superiority) are regarded as reflecting this bias. Given how wary critical IR is of authoritative claims to (universal) truth, it is no surprise that it employs a diverse range of epistemes. Postcolonialism, in seeking to represent the unique historical experiences of the non-Western INDIA REVIEW 2021, VOL. 20, NO. 5, 483–496 https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2021.1996120","PeriodicalId":56338,"journal":{"name":"India Review","volume":"20 1","pages":"483 - 496"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48055220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-20DOI: 10.1080/14736489.2021.1993707
S. Chatterjee, Udayan Das
ABSTRACT Public histories are narratives straddling across space and time, challenging the inside/outside distinction. Indian foreign policy makers have engaged in a selective remembering of the past in an attempt to script the making of a postcolonial state. The study takes up three cases from India’s foreign policy in elucidating how different imaginations of India’s identity has been refashioned to legitimize its foreign policy. These three cases point to Nehru’s decision to join the Commonwealth, Vajpayee’s strides for nuclearization and Modi’s approach toward the diaspora. We argue that foreign policy makers in India have either refrained from engaging with ‘public history’ due to their uncritical positioning in structural realism or erected versions of the past that happily rationalize their contemporary practices. The deployment of public histories has taken place to invoke India rightful place in the international order and as instruments in shaping public consensus which advances the interests of the elites in validating their foreign policy choices. This elite-driven exercise is shot through the dominant Western imaginations and cognitive categories although these elites self- consciously took charge of the destiny of a nation that had to be refashioned as ‘post- colonial.’
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