This article looks at communist engagement with literature in late colonial Bengal, and argues th... more This article looks at communist engagement with literature in late colonial Bengal, and argues that the present Left hegemony in the state is largely based on the successful construction of a Marxist discourse in bhadralok cultural productions. By analyzing the verses of two iconic Marxist poets—Sukanta Bhattacharya and Samer Sen—I try to show how the terms of this discourse register important shifts from Marxist theory, and adapts to specific concerns of the Bengali intelligentsia, especially in regard to their self-perception and imagination of social transformation. Despite internal differences on the notion of revolution and revolutionary subject in such texts, the article tries to establish how the articulation of Marxism took on a distinctive middle class character in the process.
This article looks at the lingering complexities of the Indian partition and the current state of... more This article looks at the lingering complexities of the Indian partition and the current state of refugees in south Asia. More specifically, it deals with one of the most marginal segments known as the Urdu-speaking Bihari’s living in Bangladesh. We trace the arcs of migration, prosperity and dispossession in the life histories of an extended family with two households characteristic of a particular refugee camp, that feature in many mega-cities today. The article plots this in the background of transformation of Dhaka and the metamorphosis of neighborhoods that house the camp. We focuse on details that one may understand in terms of Agamben’s “state of exception.” However, we make a case for a critical difference between “bare life” and a political form of behavior distinctive of the refugees. Their frantic struggle to exist in the middle of exception involves a ‘camouflage’ by constant shuffling of identities but that also means destabilizing their selfhood and a being in transit that may well become permanent.
This article looks at the lingering complexities of the Indian
partition and the current state of... more This article looks at the lingering complexities of the Indian partition and the current state of refugees in south Asia. More specifically, it deals with one of the most marginal segments known as the Urdu-speaking Bihari’s living in Bangladesh. We trace the arcs of migration, prosperity and dispossession in the life histories of an extended family with two households characteristic of a particular refugee camp, that feature in many mega-cities today. The article plots this in the background of transformation of Dhaka and the metamorphosis of neighborhoods that house the camp. We focuse on details that one may understand in terms of Agamben’s “state of exception.” However, we make a case for a critical difference between “bare life” and a political form of behavior distinctive of the refugees. Their frantic struggle to exist in the middle of exception involves a ‘camouflage’ by constant shuffling of identities but that also means destabilizing their selfhood and a being in transit that may well become permanent.
A book review of Ramin Jahanbegloo's book, Pedagogy of Dissent, published by Orient Blackswan, Ne... more A book review of Ramin Jahanbegloo's book, Pedagogy of Dissent, published by Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, published in September issue of EPW 2022. ISSN: 0012-9976.
Suhita Sinha Roy, The Cultural Economy of Land: Rural Bengal, circa 1860–1940, edited by Mallarik... more Suhita Sinha Roy, The Cultural Economy of Land: Rural Bengal, circa 1860–1940, edited by Mallarika Sinha Roy (New Delhi: Tulika Books), 2019, x + 184 pp., ₹595.
This essay is a fragment of a larger history of communist cultural engagements in twentieth centu... more This essay is a fragment of a larger history of communist cultural engagements in twentieth century India. Consigned to margins as petty bourgeois indulgence by doctrinaire Marxists, it reveals a creative translation of Marxism taking place that has been neglected for long. At times, this translation involved a literal representation of Marxist thought in the different languages and sensibilities of a colonial context. At other times it invited a deeper engagement with what Raymond Williams described as structures of feeling, wrestling with elements of folk tales and mythologies, with indigenous tropes of transformation, with motifs of creativity and notions of labour. The astonishing bodies of work by a large number of artists, writers, poets, actors, and critics who took part in the progressive movement illustrates this in instructive ways, giving shape to what I describe here as communist aesthetics. This essay recalls that history, with the example of a Bengali author, Manik Bandyopadhyay, one of the best representatives of this tradition but relatively less known outside Bengal. We look at a selection of his texts at some length and discuss how they were trying to making sense of the question of class in the Indian context, and activating a new kind of self-making in the process.
The paper describes how new geographies of capitalist accumulation are being spatially fixed by l... more The paper describes how new geographies of capitalist accumulation are being spatially fixed by looking at Dhaka. It discusses how land conversion, infrastructure, displacements, and dispossessions produce new urban spaces, subjects and social formations. The ethnographic research prioritizes agrarian spaces and relations as new points of entry to the urban question. Our case studies detail the transformation of Mohammadpur and Bosila – two new neighbourhoods in the western periphery of Dhaka. In a rapidly changing landscape of property and assets, they announce new towns in the middle of green paddy fields and water bodies. We underscore the contradictory territorialization of urban frontiers and the messy entanglement of agrarian and urban spaces in South Asia. The paper concludes with underscoring parallels highlighted by a set of recent studies of other cities, like New Delhi, Karachi, Kathmandu, Mumbai, and Kolkata. Drawing on them, we make a case for opening up a methodological dialogue between urban and agrarian studies for grasping the specific nature of urbanization in South Asia.
Populism and Its Limits: After Articulations, 2020
This book chapter looks at the intersection of populism, governance, and urban development. It ex... more This book chapter looks at the intersection of populism, governance, and urban development. It explores the material and symbolic changes wrought by a regional ruling party with regard to the remaking of certain neighbourhoods in a rapidly transforming mega city. The discussion focuses on changes taking place in Kolkata along the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, particularly in the Shreebhumi locality on the VIP road next to Salt Lake in the north, and Patuli on the southern stretch of the Eastern Bypass. The ongoing transformation of these localities help us to empirically illustrate and analytically break down two key elements that constitute the grain of populism in India, especially with regard to delivery of governance. The first element is a planned aesthetic of hyper-visibility, which plays on scale, repetition and the intrusive iconography of symbols clustered around an individual leader heading the regime. The chapter illustrates how it is written into a physical landscape and impacts the public perception and political mobilization in a manner that we describe as psychological priming. The second element is the impermanence and superficiality of this aesthetic, whose lack of substance and easy technological reproducibility makes it conducive to mass consumption. The chapter unpacks how the crucial element of aesthetic duplication achieves a rhetorical remaking of spaces that passes for development and access to a notional prosperity, with serious implications for political stability in the long-term perspective.
This short essay analyzes the electoral consolidation of BJP in India. The general elections of 2... more This short essay analyzes the electoral consolidation of BJP in India. The general elections of 2019 has added to its number of seats and created fresh inroads into new regions and social groups despite the growing criticism and protest against its governance and policy decisions from various sections of civil society. Based on accounts of senior journalists, scholars and seasoned commentators, and available quantitative studies, the essay talks about three major factors that can be seen as responsible for the rise of what seems to be a new era of one party dominance in India.
The direction of socialist, communist, and broadly left politics in India has a lot to do with th... more The direction of socialist, communist, and broadly left politics in India has a lot to do with the material nature of Marxism as a discourse in the subcontinent. It is mediated by a different set of vernacular languages, conceptual repertoire, and regional cultures.Certain scholars have pointed out that it involves a complex process of postcolonial translation that is ongoing. However, this recognition has not come together with a close examination of the texts that are involved in the process, for example, a critical reading of the translated works of Marx and broadly Marxism in the different languages, especially contexts where they became powerful.This essay will offer such a reading in the context of late colonial Bengal and later West Bengal. The first part of the essay will outline a background of the early translations and adaptations,their experiments as well as the setting down of certain rules of discourse on Marxism in the Bangla language. The second part of the essay will offer a close reading of the vernacular translations of Marx’s Capital, especially volume one. We will discuss a certain edition at length, published in the late twentieth century by a communist intellectual, who fell out of favor with the new party leadership. It is the first unabridged Bangla translation of Capital, published in seven volumes. For a close reading of the different dimensions of translation involved in such a process, we are going to look at specific passages from the section on commodity fetishism, which follow in the Bangla edition under the heading PanyaPouttalikata Ebang tar Rahasya. The essay will conclude with some remarks on the comparative strategies of translation and the shifting nature of Marxist discourse in the postcolonial period and its broad relations with politics.
This essay looks at some early examples of revolutionary Marxist poetry in the Bengali language i... more This essay looks at some early examples of revolutionary Marxist poetry in the Bengali language in India. In the process, we discuss some fundamental elements that went into the vernacular construction of Marxism in the late colonial context, focusing, in particular, on the notions of 'self' and 'revolution' and their complicated relationship as concept-metaphors. In doing so we critically analyse an extremely rich period of the aesthetic engagement of early Indian Marxists that practically came to an unfortunate end around the independence. At the same time, we track how this early dissemination of Marxism through the cultural practices of the 'madhyabitta' or middle class came to lay down the ideological basis for a long electoral hegemony that survived the global crisis of Marxism in the late twentieth century but is now under threat from the new right wing cultural nationalism.
This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) ‘seditio... more This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) ‘sedition’ case of February 2016, focusing particularly on its media representations. It shows how the case was, from its outset, embroiled in the politics of representation, with questions of truth and lies receding into the background to give way to clashes of opinion – however unfounded they may have been in information, fact or truth – broadly reflecting the nature of the public sphere in these ‘post-truth’ times. Further, it analyses how the protests at JNU following the event sought to project an image of the university countering right-wing representations, while also enriching debates on nationalism, democracy, dissent and freedom of speech. It concludes by showing how the hostile representations of JNU fitted well with overall politics, combining the hyper-nationalism and neoliberalism, promoted by the current regime led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the right-wing Hindu nationalist and supremacist paramilitary volunteer organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
The paper outlines the nature of student unrest gathering steam in different campuses since 2015 ... more The paper outlines the nature of student unrest gathering steam in different campuses since 2015 in India, especially focusing on the events unfolding IN JNU since 2016. It tries to analyse what is strikingly new about this latest phase of student politics in the country, in terms of the changing style of activism and its ideological recomposition, as well as the violent response of the state and the ruling elite in this regard.
Gargi Chakrabarty ed., P.C. Joshi, The People’s Warrior, P.C. Joshi Archives and Tulika, 443-456 , 2014
The paper discusses the communist imagination of the figure of 'the people' in the mid-twentieth ... more The paper discusses the communist imagination of the figure of 'the people' in the mid-twentieth century India. Drawing upon the diverse work of Chittaprosad, ranging from posters and political cartoons to famine sketches, portraits and landscapes, we outline the broad contours of a communist aesthetics that combined elements from socialist art elsewhere with original experiments with image and iconographies rooted in the vernacular context .
Although the left parties are to a large extent responsible for the democratic changes that have ... more Although the left parties are to a large extent responsible for the democratic changes that have taken place in rural West Bengal, power used to remain concentrated in the ruling elite and modifications were felt required for democratisation to become meaningful. This paper suggests a model for understanding how the Communist Party of India (Marxist) “machinery” used to function to secure electoral power and ideological hegemony for the former left regime, especially at the panchayat level in everyday village politics. The protean capacity of the party allowed changes at the local level in pragmatic ways, serving incompatible interests without being seen as different formations. The CPI(M) was clearly adept in formulating different strategies for different tiers of the panchayat system, calibrating their rivalries. Two village narratives help explore these aspects.
N Menon, A Nigam, S Palshikar eds., Critical Studies in Politics: Exploring Sites, Selves, Power, IIAS and Orient Blackswan, 67-87, 2014
The paper looks at the particular modality or style of self-fashioning among Indian Marxists, esp... more The paper looks at the particular modality or style of self-fashioning among Indian Marxists, especially, in the late colonial Bengal. Drawing upon a wide range of theoretical, literary and autobiographical sources, the paper reconstructs a body of practices with regard to' 'de-classing' and 'becoming' a Marxist in twentieth century India along with its historical limitations.
In this conjuncture of extended urbanization, this Special Issue moves beyond the landscape of th... more In this conjuncture of extended urbanization, this Special Issue moves beyond the landscape of the city and explores the changing agrarian dynamics, namely of land and livelihoods, in the unfolding frontiers of urbanization in South Asia. It identifies the feverish non-metrocentric remapping of the urban-agrarian hinterland as “frontier urbanism” and argues that in contemporary South Asia, the urban question is the agrarian question and if we wish to generate a new epistemology of the urban, then it is critical to forge a conversation between urban studies and agrarian studies and seriously engage with the question of land. As part of a larger conversation on global suburbanisms, the papers draw on ethnographic and archival research in the hinterlands of Karachi, Kathmandu, Kolkata, Mumbai, and New Delhi and describe how new geographies of capitalist accumulation are being spatially fixed, negotiated and contested and how they coproduce agrarian and urban subjects and landscapes.
This article looks at communist engagement with literature in late colonial Bengal, and argues th... more This article looks at communist engagement with literature in late colonial Bengal, and argues that the present Left hegemony in the state is largely based on the successful construction of a Marxist discourse in bhadralok cultural productions. By analyzing the verses of two iconic Marxist poets—Sukanta Bhattacharya and Samer Sen—I try to show how the terms of this discourse register important shifts from Marxist theory, and adapts to specific concerns of the Bengali intelligentsia, especially in regard to their self-perception and imagination of social transformation. Despite internal differences on the notion of revolution and revolutionary subject in such texts, the article tries to establish how the articulation of Marxism took on a distinctive middle class character in the process.
This article looks at the lingering complexities of the Indian partition and the current state of... more This article looks at the lingering complexities of the Indian partition and the current state of refugees in south Asia. More specifically, it deals with one of the most marginal segments known as the Urdu-speaking Bihari’s living in Bangladesh. We trace the arcs of migration, prosperity and dispossession in the life histories of an extended family with two households characteristic of a particular refugee camp, that feature in many mega-cities today. The article plots this in the background of transformation of Dhaka and the metamorphosis of neighborhoods that house the camp. We focuse on details that one may understand in terms of Agamben’s “state of exception.” However, we make a case for a critical difference between “bare life” and a political form of behavior distinctive of the refugees. Their frantic struggle to exist in the middle of exception involves a ‘camouflage’ by constant shuffling of identities but that also means destabilizing their selfhood and a being in transit that may well become permanent.
This article looks at the lingering complexities of the Indian
partition and the current state of... more This article looks at the lingering complexities of the Indian partition and the current state of refugees in south Asia. More specifically, it deals with one of the most marginal segments known as the Urdu-speaking Bihari’s living in Bangladesh. We trace the arcs of migration, prosperity and dispossession in the life histories of an extended family with two households characteristic of a particular refugee camp, that feature in many mega-cities today. The article plots this in the background of transformation of Dhaka and the metamorphosis of neighborhoods that house the camp. We focuse on details that one may understand in terms of Agamben’s “state of exception.” However, we make a case for a critical difference between “bare life” and a political form of behavior distinctive of the refugees. Their frantic struggle to exist in the middle of exception involves a ‘camouflage’ by constant shuffling of identities but that also means destabilizing their selfhood and a being in transit that may well become permanent.
A book review of Ramin Jahanbegloo's book, Pedagogy of Dissent, published by Orient Blackswan, Ne... more A book review of Ramin Jahanbegloo's book, Pedagogy of Dissent, published by Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, published in September issue of EPW 2022. ISSN: 0012-9976.
Suhita Sinha Roy, The Cultural Economy of Land: Rural Bengal, circa 1860–1940, edited by Mallarik... more Suhita Sinha Roy, The Cultural Economy of Land: Rural Bengal, circa 1860–1940, edited by Mallarika Sinha Roy (New Delhi: Tulika Books), 2019, x + 184 pp., ₹595.
This essay is a fragment of a larger history of communist cultural engagements in twentieth centu... more This essay is a fragment of a larger history of communist cultural engagements in twentieth century India. Consigned to margins as petty bourgeois indulgence by doctrinaire Marxists, it reveals a creative translation of Marxism taking place that has been neglected for long. At times, this translation involved a literal representation of Marxist thought in the different languages and sensibilities of a colonial context. At other times it invited a deeper engagement with what Raymond Williams described as structures of feeling, wrestling with elements of folk tales and mythologies, with indigenous tropes of transformation, with motifs of creativity and notions of labour. The astonishing bodies of work by a large number of artists, writers, poets, actors, and critics who took part in the progressive movement illustrates this in instructive ways, giving shape to what I describe here as communist aesthetics. This essay recalls that history, with the example of a Bengali author, Manik Bandyopadhyay, one of the best representatives of this tradition but relatively less known outside Bengal. We look at a selection of his texts at some length and discuss how they were trying to making sense of the question of class in the Indian context, and activating a new kind of self-making in the process.
The paper describes how new geographies of capitalist accumulation are being spatially fixed by l... more The paper describes how new geographies of capitalist accumulation are being spatially fixed by looking at Dhaka. It discusses how land conversion, infrastructure, displacements, and dispossessions produce new urban spaces, subjects and social formations. The ethnographic research prioritizes agrarian spaces and relations as new points of entry to the urban question. Our case studies detail the transformation of Mohammadpur and Bosila – two new neighbourhoods in the western periphery of Dhaka. In a rapidly changing landscape of property and assets, they announce new towns in the middle of green paddy fields and water bodies. We underscore the contradictory territorialization of urban frontiers and the messy entanglement of agrarian and urban spaces in South Asia. The paper concludes with underscoring parallels highlighted by a set of recent studies of other cities, like New Delhi, Karachi, Kathmandu, Mumbai, and Kolkata. Drawing on them, we make a case for opening up a methodological dialogue between urban and agrarian studies for grasping the specific nature of urbanization in South Asia.
Populism and Its Limits: After Articulations, 2020
This book chapter looks at the intersection of populism, governance, and urban development. It ex... more This book chapter looks at the intersection of populism, governance, and urban development. It explores the material and symbolic changes wrought by a regional ruling party with regard to the remaking of certain neighbourhoods in a rapidly transforming mega city. The discussion focuses on changes taking place in Kolkata along the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, particularly in the Shreebhumi locality on the VIP road next to Salt Lake in the north, and Patuli on the southern stretch of the Eastern Bypass. The ongoing transformation of these localities help us to empirically illustrate and analytically break down two key elements that constitute the grain of populism in India, especially with regard to delivery of governance. The first element is a planned aesthetic of hyper-visibility, which plays on scale, repetition and the intrusive iconography of symbols clustered around an individual leader heading the regime. The chapter illustrates how it is written into a physical landscape and impacts the public perception and political mobilization in a manner that we describe as psychological priming. The second element is the impermanence and superficiality of this aesthetic, whose lack of substance and easy technological reproducibility makes it conducive to mass consumption. The chapter unpacks how the crucial element of aesthetic duplication achieves a rhetorical remaking of spaces that passes for development and access to a notional prosperity, with serious implications for political stability in the long-term perspective.
This short essay analyzes the electoral consolidation of BJP in India. The general elections of 2... more This short essay analyzes the electoral consolidation of BJP in India. The general elections of 2019 has added to its number of seats and created fresh inroads into new regions and social groups despite the growing criticism and protest against its governance and policy decisions from various sections of civil society. Based on accounts of senior journalists, scholars and seasoned commentators, and available quantitative studies, the essay talks about three major factors that can be seen as responsible for the rise of what seems to be a new era of one party dominance in India.
The direction of socialist, communist, and broadly left politics in India has a lot to do with th... more The direction of socialist, communist, and broadly left politics in India has a lot to do with the material nature of Marxism as a discourse in the subcontinent. It is mediated by a different set of vernacular languages, conceptual repertoire, and regional cultures.Certain scholars have pointed out that it involves a complex process of postcolonial translation that is ongoing. However, this recognition has not come together with a close examination of the texts that are involved in the process, for example, a critical reading of the translated works of Marx and broadly Marxism in the different languages, especially contexts where they became powerful.This essay will offer such a reading in the context of late colonial Bengal and later West Bengal. The first part of the essay will outline a background of the early translations and adaptations,their experiments as well as the setting down of certain rules of discourse on Marxism in the Bangla language. The second part of the essay will offer a close reading of the vernacular translations of Marx’s Capital, especially volume one. We will discuss a certain edition at length, published in the late twentieth century by a communist intellectual, who fell out of favor with the new party leadership. It is the first unabridged Bangla translation of Capital, published in seven volumes. For a close reading of the different dimensions of translation involved in such a process, we are going to look at specific passages from the section on commodity fetishism, which follow in the Bangla edition under the heading PanyaPouttalikata Ebang tar Rahasya. The essay will conclude with some remarks on the comparative strategies of translation and the shifting nature of Marxist discourse in the postcolonial period and its broad relations with politics.
This essay looks at some early examples of revolutionary Marxist poetry in the Bengali language i... more This essay looks at some early examples of revolutionary Marxist poetry in the Bengali language in India. In the process, we discuss some fundamental elements that went into the vernacular construction of Marxism in the late colonial context, focusing, in particular, on the notions of 'self' and 'revolution' and their complicated relationship as concept-metaphors. In doing so we critically analyse an extremely rich period of the aesthetic engagement of early Indian Marxists that practically came to an unfortunate end around the independence. At the same time, we track how this early dissemination of Marxism through the cultural practices of the 'madhyabitta' or middle class came to lay down the ideological basis for a long electoral hegemony that survived the global crisis of Marxism in the late twentieth century but is now under threat from the new right wing cultural nationalism.
This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) ‘seditio... more This article analyses the politics around the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) ‘sedition’ case of February 2016, focusing particularly on its media representations. It shows how the case was, from its outset, embroiled in the politics of representation, with questions of truth and lies receding into the background to give way to clashes of opinion – however unfounded they may have been in information, fact or truth – broadly reflecting the nature of the public sphere in these ‘post-truth’ times. Further, it analyses how the protests at JNU following the event sought to project an image of the university countering right-wing representations, while also enriching debates on nationalism, democracy, dissent and freedom of speech. It concludes by showing how the hostile representations of JNU fitted well with overall politics, combining the hyper-nationalism and neoliberalism, promoted by the current regime led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the right-wing Hindu nationalist and supremacist paramilitary volunteer organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
The paper outlines the nature of student unrest gathering steam in different campuses since 2015 ... more The paper outlines the nature of student unrest gathering steam in different campuses since 2015 in India, especially focusing on the events unfolding IN JNU since 2016. It tries to analyse what is strikingly new about this latest phase of student politics in the country, in terms of the changing style of activism and its ideological recomposition, as well as the violent response of the state and the ruling elite in this regard.
Gargi Chakrabarty ed., P.C. Joshi, The People’s Warrior, P.C. Joshi Archives and Tulika, 443-456 , 2014
The paper discusses the communist imagination of the figure of 'the people' in the mid-twentieth ... more The paper discusses the communist imagination of the figure of 'the people' in the mid-twentieth century India. Drawing upon the diverse work of Chittaprosad, ranging from posters and political cartoons to famine sketches, portraits and landscapes, we outline the broad contours of a communist aesthetics that combined elements from socialist art elsewhere with original experiments with image and iconographies rooted in the vernacular context .
Although the left parties are to a large extent responsible for the democratic changes that have ... more Although the left parties are to a large extent responsible for the democratic changes that have taken place in rural West Bengal, power used to remain concentrated in the ruling elite and modifications were felt required for democratisation to become meaningful. This paper suggests a model for understanding how the Communist Party of India (Marxist) “machinery” used to function to secure electoral power and ideological hegemony for the former left regime, especially at the panchayat level in everyday village politics. The protean capacity of the party allowed changes at the local level in pragmatic ways, serving incompatible interests without being seen as different formations. The CPI(M) was clearly adept in formulating different strategies for different tiers of the panchayat system, calibrating their rivalries. Two village narratives help explore these aspects.
N Menon, A Nigam, S Palshikar eds., Critical Studies in Politics: Exploring Sites, Selves, Power, IIAS and Orient Blackswan, 67-87, 2014
The paper looks at the particular modality or style of self-fashioning among Indian Marxists, esp... more The paper looks at the particular modality or style of self-fashioning among Indian Marxists, especially, in the late colonial Bengal. Drawing upon a wide range of theoretical, literary and autobiographical sources, the paper reconstructs a body of practices with regard to' 'de-classing' and 'becoming' a Marxist in twentieth century India along with its historical limitations.
In this conjuncture of extended urbanization, this Special Issue moves beyond the landscape of th... more In this conjuncture of extended urbanization, this Special Issue moves beyond the landscape of the city and explores the changing agrarian dynamics, namely of land and livelihoods, in the unfolding frontiers of urbanization in South Asia. It identifies the feverish non-metrocentric remapping of the urban-agrarian hinterland as “frontier urbanism” and argues that in contemporary South Asia, the urban question is the agrarian question and if we wish to generate a new epistemology of the urban, then it is critical to forge a conversation between urban studies and agrarian studies and seriously engage with the question of land. As part of a larger conversation on global suburbanisms, the papers draw on ethnographic and archival research in the hinterlands of Karachi, Kathmandu, Kolkata, Mumbai, and New Delhi and describe how new geographies of capitalist accumulation are being spatially fixed, negotiated and contested and how they coproduce agrarian and urban subjects and landscapes.
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Papers by Rajarshi Dasgupta
partition and the current state of refugees in south Asia. More
specifically, it deals with one of the most marginal segments
known as the Urdu-speaking Bihari’s living in Bangladesh. We
trace the arcs of migration, prosperity and dispossession in the
life histories of an extended family with two households
characteristic of a particular refugee camp, that feature in many
mega-cities today. The article plots this in the background of
transformation of Dhaka and the metamorphosis of
neighborhoods that house the camp. We focuse on details that
one may understand in terms of Agamben’s “state of exception.”
However, we make a case for a critical difference between “bare
life” and a political form of behavior distinctive of the refugees.
Their frantic struggle to exist in the middle of exception involves
a ‘camouflage’ by constant shuffling of identities but that also
means destabilizing their selfhood and a being in transit that may
well become permanent.
partition and the current state of refugees in south Asia. More
specifically, it deals with one of the most marginal segments
known as the Urdu-speaking Bihari’s living in Bangladesh. We
trace the arcs of migration, prosperity and dispossession in the
life histories of an extended family with two households
characteristic of a particular refugee camp, that feature in many
mega-cities today. The article plots this in the background of
transformation of Dhaka and the metamorphosis of
neighborhoods that house the camp. We focuse on details that
one may understand in terms of Agamben’s “state of exception.”
However, we make a case for a critical difference between “bare
life” and a political form of behavior distinctive of the refugees.
Their frantic struggle to exist in the middle of exception involves
a ‘camouflage’ by constant shuffling of identities but that also
means destabilizing their selfhood and a being in transit that may
well become permanent.