My Son’s Inheritance: A Secret History of Lynching and Blood Justice in India edited by Aparna Vaidik, New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2020; pp 173, Rs499.
The paper, in three parts, examines the question of lived experience and Dalit subjectivity in a caste society. The first part argues that the signature postcolonial concepts like “plurality” of lifeworlds as postcolonial historical “difference” fail to provide a method to read Dalit politics outside the framework of irony. The second part critically evaluates existing debates on experience/theory as a necessary precondition for Dalit subjectivity. The paper ends with a speculative reading of “Ambedkar thought” as a decision that creates an ontological separation from the Hindu social. It argues that such subjective decision is prior to experience/theory—it is only through separation that one recognises an experience.
The recent Rohingya crisis in South Asia raised questions regarding the refugee policies of the Indian state, which seem to take a very diplomatic position on the refugee problem. This article seeks to argue that India’s kindness for some refugee communities and ignorant behaviour for Muslim refugees has raised a doubt on its way of refugee dealings, and has posed question on the very secular face of the Indian state. How the Supreme Court as well as the Indian government has viewed and handled the refugee problem has been discussed in detail in this article.
The dynamics of the Sabarimala issue and its politics are analysed by trying to disassemble three intertwined features of the issue, namely the deep-rooted masculine performance in the Sabarimala pilgrimage, evolution of temple politics and the process of constituting the temple as a standard site of worship for the “Hindus,” and caste dynamics and Hindutva’s political desire.
Hindu College was set up in Calcutta in 1817 as a pioneering institution to impart Western learning to its students. In 1831, its most outstanding teacher, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, then only 22 years old, was compelled to resign. A look at the circumstances that forced his resignation attempts to reconstruct Derozio's ideas and his teaching methods. The episode offers a glimpse of the intellectual ambience of early 19th-century Calcutta.
