Organizer: Cabeiri D. Robinson, University of Washington
Chair: Bernard Bate, Yale University
In Modern Social Imaginaries, Charles Taylor articulates
a vision of what is truly new about modern cosmologies of sociopolitical order.
Though he focuses on their production in Europe and America, he briefly nods
toward Dipesh Chakrabarty’s
call to provincialize Europe and suggests that other modern social imaginaries
are possible. The linked panels, South Asian Social Imaginaries Parts I-II,
frame a broad conversation between South Asianist scholars querying the coherencies,
incoherencies, and singularities of emerging social imaginations in contemporary
South Asia. Participants with research expertise in India, Sri Lanka, and
Pakistan examine what is singular to (and discontinuous within) regional structures
and histories of how people understand themselves on the macro-scale. Their
papers consider how regional expertise alternately clarifies or complicates
the theoretical objects of modern social imaginaries such as the public sphere,
civil society, religion, the people, the nation, democracy, and the notion
of the region itself. The papers in Part I take up the challenge of thinking
about what other modern social imaginaries emerge out of South Asia, whereas
the papers in Part II consider how elements of globalized forms of modern social
imaginaries are clarified and complicated. The two panels are structured to
facilitate a larger intellectual exchange between paper givers and attendant-participants
by encouraging sustained discussion within and between the two panels.
Neloufer de Mel, University of Columbo
The protracted armed conflict in Sri Lanka has been contingent on the forging
of communities that sustain, negotiate with, alter, and/or resist militarization
and ethno-nationalist calls to war. Against the backdrop of the militarization
that encourages largely rural male youth to enlist in the army, and the globalization
that facilitates transnational garment factories that employ large numbers
of female youth, my paper focuses on how these two constituencies in the south
of the country are shaped to support the war. It also analyzes the parallels
and discontinuities to this trend in the LTTE controlled north. This paper
explores the social imaginaries that authorize military discourse and the repertoire
of arrangements, narratives, and performativities which effect a politics
of recognition that values the military unit as a significant and emergent social
category in Sri Lanka. The paper will analyze what prompts “garment girls” to
look for military husbands and how these relationships shape the civil-military
balance in Free Trade Zones. What knowledge of the LTTE’s governmentality
and approach to the reproduction of militarism does its marriage bureau for
its cadres impart, and what do alternative marriage practices in Jaffna teach
us about its people’s negotiation with militarism? How do intersecting
class and caste identities influence all these relationships? Drawing on interviews
with female garment factory workers and combatants, army soldiers, Sinhala films,
and ethnographies of FTZs and Jaffna marriage practices, the paper points to
how diverse ethnic groups are poised to engage with their “critical others” in
an emergent Sri Lanka.
Mona Bhan, DePauw University
In the aftermath of the Kargil war of 1999 between India and Pakistan, the
Indian army launched Operation Sadhbhavna (Goodwill), a development initiative
meant to win the “hearts and minds” of alienated border communities.
Based on the re-envisioning of the “security doctrine” in the 1990s,
Operation Sadhbhavna signaled Indian military’s effort to curb “incipient
terrorism” in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir by bolstering human
security through discrete development projects. Within this context, my paper
seeks to explore how the Indian military conceptualized and negotiated the shift
from state to people-centric definitions of security in the post-war period,
the inherent contradictions and dilemmas in pursuing humanist in conjunction
with intense militarization on the borders, and the extent to which Operation
Sadhbhavna dislodged military’s traditional emphases on territorial and
national security. I contend that human security agendas have not supplanted
conventional preoccupations with national security, given India’s territorial
disputes with its neighbors and the ongoing insurgency in Kashmir and the
North-East. On the contrary, the divergent ideologies within which humanist
and militarist conceptions of security are embedded create contestations regarding
the appropriate role of the military in India and raise questions about the
intent and purpose of Sadhbhavna. Based on extensive ethnographic research in
Ladakh that includes interviews with military officers, discourse analysis of
military brochures and documents, and participant observation of several Sadhbhavna
projects and events, I analyze the shifting modalities of military governance
in India and its implications for peace and democracy in the region.
Ravindiran Sriramachandran, Columbia University
In 1948, by an act of legislature, 1.2 million Indian plantation workers
in Sri Lanka were rendered stateless and hundreds of thousands were “repatriated” back
to India in the 1970s. There, too, they were/are not accepted as “Indians” by
the local dominant community or the lower echelons of the state, as the “repatriate” was
seen as an aberration, a figure that defies the “normalcy” of any
common sense understanding (i.e. Indian, people, caste etc.) in South Asia.
This understanding is not so much the “state’s” understanding
of who belongs and who doesn’t (after all, it is the Indian state that
agreed to their repatriation), but in the way people interpret that “understanding”.
Focusing on the Tamil Plantation repatriates’ claim to (up)rootedness
and a simultaneous claim to a multi-sited belonging, I examine what it means
to speak of “oor” (home), “nadu”(country), “makkal” (people), “mozhi” (language),
and “samoogam” (society). Virtually all of Tamil politics hinges
on an understanding of these paradigmatic terms and forms the backbone of Tamil
political discourse. Do these terms mean the same thing to local dominant groups
in India as to the repatriates? How do they understand them? What does this
understanding translate to for everyday life? The repatriates’ conception
of these terms puts to question the assumed equation of unity with homogeneity
and equality with uniformity and questions the inability on part of the local
dominant communities and the state to accommodate demands of deep and defiant
diversity.
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