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Posts from the ‘Academic Debate’ category

A Response to the Ambedkar Reading Group

By Souradeep Roy
This is a response to the ‘Statement on Student Protest’ by the Ambedkar Reading Group and some other points of discourse. The Ambedkar Reading Group alleges that the language and manner of protests carried out by the students of MA English, University of Delhi, is casteist. The critique in my article makes a close reading of the ARG’s concerns and accepts that casteist remarks were indeed made by students. This piece largely argues that both the ARG and the students are against one common enemy: the brahminical system of appointments.

Out of Touch? How this Response to Hokkolorob at Jadavpur University Distracts from its Graded Social Dynamics

By Joyeeta Dey & Anushka Sen
The movement protesting police violence against students in Jadavpur University, Kolkata, is right now in its most vulnerable position. The marching has calmed, a high court order aimed at restoring “normalcy” to the campus has been implemented, the issue is beginning to fade from television and the public imagination, while, in all this time, not a single demand of the protestors has been met.

Prof. Amartya Sen, Are the Indians Argumentative Enough?

By Mosarrap H. Khan
Prof. Sen’s painstaking excavation of a past argumentative tradition in India does justice to our understanding of Indian democratic culture and shows us the relevance of such a tradition in our own times for finding solutions to sectarian politics. What we further require is an understanding of the psyche of the ‘Emotional Indian’ in the general framework of the ‘Argumentative Indian’.

An Interview with Dr. Neha Vora on ‘Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora’ (2013)

By E P Mohammed Swalih
This is what I mean by “consumer citizenship” – you mark your identity and belonging through material goods. This is of course connected to prosperity but it is not reducible to wealth. I remember one of my first interviewees in Dubai telling me that when he was growing up in Kerala, Carrefour plastic bags were considered status symbols.

Media and Moral Policing: The TV9 Report on UoH Students

By Abu Saleh
After watching the report, the UoH campus community took it seriously. Students responded in social media about the misrepresentation of campus life. False allegations like portraying students as drug and sex addicts were seen as moral policing. Further, it led to a larger debate when the report suggested that the non-locals were damaging ‘culture’ here.

Obituary: Remembering Sharmila Rege (1964 – 2013)

By Deepa Sreenivas
By all accounts, Sharmila and her colleagues at the Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre re-made this terrain, infusing every classroom and every text with the spirit of feminist pedagogy. This is evident from the fact that a large number of theoretical texts were translated from English to Marathi so as to make them accessible to students from the vernacular medium.

Vivek Chibber-Partha Chatterjee Debate at the Historical Materialism Conference, 2013

By Mary Ann Chacko
One cannot help but detect the dejection in Chibber when he comes to the podium to respond to Chatterjee and Weinstein. He states that “much of Partha’s response is to the effect that I’ve misrepresented or misread the work.” Chibber says that “he is disappointed but not entirely surprised” by this response and that “the readers [of his book] will have to make up their own mind [about the legitimacy of those claims].…The fact is this – there are three generations of scholars committed to this.