Krist

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | 10.51818/SJHSS.10.2019.1-21 | Page: 1-21,
Section: Article

Gandhi and the Development Discourse

Siby K. George is Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He is author of Heidegger and Development in the Global South (Springer, 2015), co-editor of Cultural Ontology of the Self in Pain (Springer, 2016) and Teaching in Unequal Societies (Bloomsbury, 2020), and of a number of journal papers and book chapters.

ABSTRACT

The figure of Gandhi as the man who distrusted, deconstructed and stood up to the colonizer’s moral discourse has had abiding significance for the colonized part of the world. The central tenet of the Gandhian counter- narrative is the rejection of developmental modernity and the portrayal of an alternative development model. The human and ecological crises of the twentieth century arose from the problems of modernity for Gandhi.

As these problems further amplify, the Gandhian diagnosis becomes increasingly significant. However, a careful reading of the Gandhian critique of developmental modernity shows that he did not reject the moral, political and ontological underpinnings of modernity tout court. The answer to the problems of developmental modernity does not lie in a simple, unproblematic reversal as seen in the debates that Gandhi had with his critics on issues concerning development. The meaning of counter- developmentalism or post-development must, therefore, be the reframing of the ‘modern’ quest for human freedom, fulfillment and equality without sidestepping the culture of wanton consumption.

Keywords: Development ethics, Post development, Modernity, Crisis, Alternatives.

Remembering Mahatma as Gandhi: Gandhi as Political ... / v
Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.10.2019.v-xiv | Page: v-xiv,
Section: Editorial

Editorial

Remembering Mahatma as Gandhi: Gandhi as Political Philosopher and Social Theorist

Pius V Thomas is Faculty at the Department of Philosophy, Assam University, Silchar. Areas of specialization are Contemporary Western Philosophy, Critical Hermeneutics, Ethics-Applied Ethics, Theories of Democracy, Religion and Human Rights, Philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. His current research interests are focused on the question of the possibility of contextualizing Human Rights, along with cultural critique, which stimulates themes like Philosophical concepts of Interculturality and Critique, Ethics and Reason, Democracy and Religion, Environmental Ethics and the Philosophy of Education. He has a good number of papers and articles to his credit.

The special issue dedicated to Gandhi titled ‘Remembering Mahatma as Gandhi: Gandhi as Political Philosopher and Social Theorist’ intends to address Gandhi’s concept of democracy, its delicate relation with his millennial ideal of non-violence/Ahimsa and the intent and impact of Gandhian thought in the contemporary discourses on socio-cultural-political life and coexistence.

Many influential studies and social theorists have pointed out the legacy of Gandhian thought on contemporary philosophy and social theory as – rigorously reprimanding and controversially concealing – simultaneously. Nonetheless, Gandhi and his philosophy prominently figures in all discussions about democracy, ethics of plurality and political morality. Therefore, we have solemn re-readings and reinterpretations of Gandhi which consummate radical negotiability with the concepts of democracy, nation state, critique of modernity, human rights, civil society, religion and social freedom. We have worthy models of rereading of Gandhi in the theoretic efforts of Partha Chatterjee, Ashish Nandy, Bikhu Parekh, Akeel Bilgrami, Shiv Viswanathan, Ramchandra Guha, Sumit Sarkar, Rudolf C Heredia and Thomas Pantham – to mention a few prominent names from the scores of such efforts from India and abroad.

Ramachandra Guha in one of his timely and interesting write up on Gandhi published in Malayalam1 discusses how three authors, Ivan Meysky, S A Danke and S D Saklathwala wrote comparatively about Gandhi and tall secular leaders of Gandhi’s time – mainly in order to praise leaders such as Lenin, Ata Turk and Sukarno. For the authors, while these secular, progressive and popular leaders spearheaded liberative movements against power and exploitation of the masses, Gandhi in the pretext of his principle of Ahimsa, religious ideas of Dharma and Truth acted like a reactionary who wanted to recreate the past. Guha, nonetheless, completes his write up by underlining a relevant and a timely perspective that inspires us all, that:

[As we celebrate the One Fiftieth Birth Anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi]…I think that the posthumous fame and reputation of Gandhi among the ordinary masses and intellectuals alike is far above than Lenin. Clearly, above the Russian prophet of arms revolution and class antagonism stands now the Indian Prophet of Ahimsa and brotherhood and fellowship of all religions and even after thousands of years he [Gandhi] would stand as the guide of humanity.

Hence, Gandhi’s thought constantly resurges many major issues such as nature; environment and lifeworld; democracy and development; casteism and caste inequality; the concept of language and democracy; the critique of western modernity and capitalism; women and swaraj and their role in democracy; social freedom; nationalism and patriotism; democracy and non-violence; the critique of modern science and technology and human rights.

Meanwhile, we should also see the major debates which took place across the length and breadth of the theoretical gamut of social theory and philosophy which challenged many aspects of Gandhi’s concept of democracy and Ahimsa. Gandhian concept of democracy which presumes non-violence as its contour/guiding principle have been intensely criticized by many thinkers like Ambedkar as well as by the recent critics of institutionalized democracy. In recent times Gail Omvedt and Arundhati Roy make this discussion alive. Arundhati Roy shows us that Gandhi’s ideals of self purification fail to make poverty visible as Gandhi’s ideals of simplicity is always mired with political power. She consistently argues that poverty cannot be simulated as Gandhi wanted to do, as it is sheer powerlessness and not having money or possessions. Whereas those who are at the receiving end of untouchability and caste system are in inimitable poverty.3 It is interesting to note a new dimension that D.R Nagaraj shares with us in this regard. He writes:

Untouchability was of the central concerns of Gandhiji. In all historical fairness it must be admitted that it was Bapu who made untouchability one of the crucial questions of Indian Politics, although there were many yogis and movements before him in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries whose contribution require a deeper grasp and analysis…Gandhiji’s take off point was that the problem of untouchability was a problem of the self, in this case the collective Hindu self. He had transformed the notion of the Individual self and the necessity of clearing the cobwebs of caste ego was shifted to the level of the larger notion of the collective self.4

However, such criticisms and observations on Gandhi’s concept of democracy and non-violence surrounding the social violence (Himsa), surrounding the issues of casteism and violence on the Dalits, the nascent grey areas of the idealized uncertainty of minorities’, the violently patronized and promoted issues related with language-identity, religious issues related with religions’ place in the public sphere, and the responsible dispositions of the civil society along with the moments of Gandhi’s self-transcendence opens up a larger understanding of Indian reality – as D R Nagaraj has shown – make rereading of Gandhi politically more demanding.

Therefore, an interesting aspect that runs through all the serious introspections on the ideas and concepts of Gandhi is a reckoning the sage, who largely made the fortunes of political and social India on the one side and on the other side is being remembered as the failed prophet of Indian democracy – but who still commands the most original discussions on democracy and self rule. That is the reason why it is to be admirably remembered that Gandhi has encountered almost all the conundrums related with democratic and post traditional socio-political coexistence. As Ramchandra Guha said in an interview recently, Gandhi’s nationalism was democratically affirmative to the core as it was essentially pluralist and keeping the highest model of social freedom in its core. It is this sense and ideal of democratic diversity that made him address the social and political concepts of his time from deep critical perspectives and strive for the principle of reconciliation of the political with the ethical-spiritual. As Tridip Suhrud points out:

This divide between the religious, spiritual Gandhi and the political one or, more aptly, the divide between Gandhi the ashramite and Gandhi the satyagrahi has come to shape not only our academic engagement with the life and thought of Gandhi, but also our memory of the man whom we revere, revile or remain indifferent to. The dichotomy is a superficial one. Gandhi saw himself as a satyagrahi and an ashramite. His politics was imbued with spiritual strivings and his relationship with religion was a deeply political one.

Akeel Bilgrami, in a study on Gandhi highlights the above mentioned divide in a slightly different fashion, “[t]he quality of his thought has sometimes been lost because of the other images Gandhi evolves – a shrewd politician and a deeply spiritual figure.”6 Though Akeel Bilgrami takes his interpretation of Gandhi into a track which more politically deals with the spiritual image of Gandhi, it seems that the questions related with the uniqueness of Gandhian democratic instruments cannot be answered unless a determining link is established between Gandhi the ashramite and Gandhi the satyagrahi. The major question in this context, let us assume that though it is debatably resilient, can it be beneficial to think that the strong conceptual connective that links Gandhi the ashramite and Gandhi the satyagrahi is his philosophy of nonviolence or Ahimsa and the latter as the primary socio-political category that defines the ontology of democracy according to Gandhi. Gandhi’s Principle of Ahimsa as that which Determines the Political Gandhi.

Though it may be commented that the observation that Gandhi’s legacy will continue to determine the core and ambience of modern democracy is an overemphasized truism, it can sufficiently inform the contemporary thoughts on both the theoretical and practical concepts of democracy. The contemporary critiques of democracy world over will be incomplete
without Gandhian critique of liberal democracy.

Firstly, Gandhi challenges the majoritarianism of numbers in democracy. Gandhi achieves the ideal of democracy which can claim its uniqueness when he rejects democracy as Majoritarianism of any form. Gandhi agreed to the popular ideal of democracy where the opinion of the majority is counted. But, he captures the core of democracy and the democratic process when he held the view that, “when a respectable minority objects to any rule of conduct it would be dignified for the majority to yield to the minority.” The ethic that Gandhi was trying to introduce and inscribe into Indian political life, as pointed out was that, “real swaraj will not be the acquisition of authority by a few but the acquisition of the capacity of all to resist authority when it is abused.”

Secondly, Gandhi rejects the logic of power that is derived by the liberal model of democracy from the culturally insensitive technological civilization. As Ramin Jahanbegloo tells us:

In response to the totalizing project of modernity exemplified by colonial domination and a discursive dominance of positivist and reductionist science, Gandhi laid down two conditions for the enshrinement of moral civilization in Hind Swaraj. First, his notion of Swaraj, which referred to three philosophical, ethical and political ideas of self examination, self rule and self determination. Second, his concept of Sarvodaya or welfare of all, which rejected the Utilitarian view of liberal democracy as representing greatest good of the greatest number.

Consequently, Gandhi shows us that the violence involved in the deadly combination of techno-scientific capitalism –its ideal of domination of nature and its brute force and economic greed – which the liberal form of democracy in its failure to recognize becomes the helpless carrier and perpetrator of all the above.

Gandhi’s concept of non-violence becomes actively and politically visible here. According to Gandhi, though non-violence never evades violence fully, it carries on a constant struggle against arrogance and violence. It is a very powerful and active force. The followers of non-violence would never retreat at the sight of violence. As A K Saran writes, according to Gandhi, “[v]iolence is negative in nature, for every violent act or thought violates reality. All violence is violence against reality. Non- violence is acceptance of reality as it is.”8 As quoted by Saran, Gandhi explains this as follows:

…When parties to a situation do not see the relevant reality in a mutually acceptable way, the believer in non-violence, that is, the one who wants to accept reality as it is, will voluntarily undertake to suffer for his vision of reality….This will bring about a change of heart and mind of the other party, or in the sufferer, or in both and thus a common vision of reality willemerge, eliminating any imposition of a supervening reality by the use of superior physical force.

Perhaps in the writings of thinkers like Bilgrami we can find out how Gandhi’s concept of non-violence devises the struggle for swaraj, which is a term closest to democracy for Gandhi or a concept that which makes Gandhi’s concept of democracy distinct. As Bilgrami writes:

It [Ahimsa]…became a self conscious instrument in politics in this century… It was studied under different names, first usually as part of religious or contemplative ways of life remote from the public affairs of men and state, and later with the coming of romantic thought in Europe, under the rubric of critiques of industrial civilization. For Gandhi, both these contexts were absolutely essential to his conception of non-violence. Non-violence was central in his nationalist mobilization against British rule in India. But the concept is also situated in an essentially religious temperament as well as in a thoroughgoing critique of ideas and ideologies of the Enlightenment and of an intellectual paradigm of perhaps a century earlier than the Enlightenment.

Gandhi views the perverted combination of – colonialism and the uncritical modernity along with the one dimensional technological domination – act together as violence against human dignity and therefore becomes essentially antidemocratic. Ahimsa is in recognizing the cognitive enslavement of colonial modernity and its sibling liberal democracy and critiquing them. The proximity to the above formulated and accomplished conceptual and praxeological Gandhi and Gandhian thought, perhaps makes us to think that it determines the authenticity and seriousness of any theoretical engagement in India after Gandhi.

The present volume as the result of a debate on the relevance of remembering Gandhi comes out with some major and intimate engagements with Gandhian thought and its significance. Siby K George’s paper titled, ‘Gandhi and the Development Discourse’, brings to the fore one of the major engagements that has been endorsed to Gandhi’s philosophy and its overall impact on our socio-cultural and political life. The paper scrutinizes and also problematizes Gandhi’s cognitive disengagement with the colonizer’s moral discourse. The discussion highlights Gandhi’s ‘counter-narrative and its ‘rejection of the modern developmental state and his alternative of an ethical form of development’  as the ecological and human crisis of the twentieth century was the direct consequence of the inner morbidity of modernity. However, along with many contemporary thinkers the paper draws our attention to the fact that the problem of modernity that Gandhi has challenged doesn’t make him a retrogressive anti-modernist. The paper quite insistently attempts further to show and argue that the alternative development picture that Gandhi has put forward is significant in the face of the dehumanizing impacts of modernity.

George Thadathil in his paper titled ‘A Conciliatory Gaze: SNG on MK Gandhi and BR Ambedkar’ involves in highlighting the Gandhi- Ambedkar debates in the past decade and attempt to bring in Narayana Guru into the debate and expand to focus more on reinventing the debate and discourse. Narayana Guru as a Keralite/Malayalee Vedantin social reformer and revolutionary campaigner against untouchability and caste system has been a prophetic forerunner to the Gandhian project besides being part of the Gandhain dialogue network later.

The paper in its search for potential reconciliation of the irreconcilable positions of Gandhi and Ambedkar brings in the notion of Narayana Guru’s atma sukham (self-happiness or self-joy or soul-bliss) as a concept that can act as a ‘purification process of all religious views and in itself being an alternative conceptualization of spiritual wellbeing’. The attempt to ground such a search draws attention to the somewhat unknown and hidden views and philosophical position of SNG into dialogue with the more elaborately written and argued positions of Ambedkar and Gandhi. The paper tries to show that the failure of ‘Gandhi’s project for modern India among the Dalits, Adivasis and Women on the one hand, and the circumspection as
regards to Ambedkar’s version of modern India among the upper castes and strata on the other, pose the need for a new path and advocates.’ These could be drawn out from SNG and SNG movement with its vision of selfhood for a people who can ‘re-script their identity’. The paper by Pius V Thomas and Violina Patowary, which discusses ‘Gandhi’s Legacy: Vandana Shiva as Gandhi’s Heir’ emphasizes the contemporariness and legacy of the political Gandhi who influences the contemporary concepts of democracy, ethics of plurality and political morality. The paper takes its course of discussion to a radical critique of globalized world, global institutions, the environment and nature in order to locate the democracy proper. In such an effort the paper aligns the notion of political Gandhi with a ‘radical and intimate interlocutor like Vandana Shiva who builds up her ecofeminist theoretical environmentalism and the principles of global coexistence and democracy through a Gandhian paradigm. The discussion in the paper convincingly hint at the idea that the concept of earth democracy, which Vandana Shiva puts forward to mediate a major environmental ethical and socio-political ideal in addressing the environmental crisis rests quite credibly on the Gandhian ideal of Swaraj.

‘Gandhi in the Tropics: Climate, Disease and Medicine’ by Bikash Sarma discusses a historiography of medicine in India and Gandhi’s engagement with it through a process of qualitative denunciation and qualitative appreciation. The paper argues that the western medicine in the context of India cannot be cognized without an elaborate historiography that highlights the knowledge production that the colonizer made according to the changing ‘perception about the landscape, climate, disease and the natives at the contact zone.’ The paper makes an effort to track down the emergence of the colonial discourse on medicine and make Gandhi stand in dialoge with the emerging discourse.

‘The Violence of Non-violence: Reading Nirad C Chaudhuri Rereading Gandhi’ by Jaydeep Chakrabarty explores and challenges the logic of Gandhi’s concept of non-violence with the aim of showing its nexus with its binary opposite, violence. The paper does it through a ‘reading of Nirad C Chaudhuri’s critique of Gandhi and Gandhism,’ supported by ‘Jacques Derrida, John Milton and Rabindranath Tagore’s conceptuality of binary opposites.’ The discussion, however, aims to address and work out the ‘common areas’ and of meaning of nonviolence in Gandhi and its binary opposite violence.

Subhra Nag’s paper titled, ‘Freedom, Authority and Care as Moral Postulates: Reexamining Gandhi’s Proposal for Ethical Reconstruction’ makes a feminist ethical interrogation of Gandhi and the Gandhain thought. It challenges and interrogates Gandhi’s moral thought and ideas in what paper calls in a single frame of analysis in order to attain an alternative moral stance, which could be more in dialogue with the ethics of care.

The paper titled, ‘Decoding Gandhigiri: A genealogy of a ‘popular’ Gandhi’ by Abhijit Ray makes a critical study of Lage Raho Munna Bhai in its effort to explore the popular cultural and filmic representation of Gandhism in Bollywood movies. The paper in this connection takes up Gandhi’s critique of modernity and how it ignites debatable post-modernist ideas. The paper observes that the movie Lage Raho Munna Bhai’ ‘re-engineered’ certain ideas of Gandhi without going to the deeper meaning of Gandhian philosophy and created a populist Gandhi. The paper argues that though Gandhigiri exhibits certain post-modernist traits of kitch and populism, it also rightly upholds Gandhi and his persona.

Though the volume is slender in terms of the number of the papers, the engagements which take place in the papers presented in situating and encountering Gandhi and Gandhian thought seem to be creatively border crossing the conventional delimitations in discussing Gandhi and conceptually diverse. The volume, I hope, will find its own niche in the efforts to know and remember Gandhi.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861
Section: Contents

Remembering Gandhi: Political Philosopher and Social Theorist

 CONTENTS

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | 10.51818/SJHSS.10.2019.22-47 | Page: 22-47,
Section: Articles

A Conciliatory Gaze : SNG on MK Gandhi and BR Ambedkar

George Thadathil is the Principal of Salesian College, Sonada and Siliguri. He is the author of Vision from the Margin and has edited and co-edited number of books besides contributing to a number of journals and edited volumes. He is the founder Director of Salesian Publications, Salesian Research Centre and Salesian Translation Centre.

ABSTRACT

The paper is a continuation of the research undertaken nearly 20 years ago motivated by the conviction that in the contemporary socio-political scenario of the country, the vision of Narayana Guru has a contribution to make. Though his name finds a place among others like Jyoti Rao Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar on the one side, and RamaKrishna, Aurobindo, Gandhi and Tagore on the other, a mediation is yet to be effected: a mediation between a dominant vision and a subjugated people within the philosophical history of India. In other words, the disillusionment as regards Gandhi’s project for modern India among the Dalits, Adivasis and Women on the one hand, andthe circumspection as regards Ambedkar’s version of modern India among the upper castes and strata on the other, pose the need for a new path. There could possibly be in SNGM vision an answer to the search for selfhood of a people to re-script the nation. The paper explores the theme by looking at the following: first, the emergence of SNG movement and thought; second the question of religious conversion within socio-cultural specter of Ambedkar-Gandhi; third the contemporary flow of religious wisdom into politics; fourth the opening to the resurgence of religion for humanity that SNG offers.

Keywords: Gandhi-Ambedkar debate, Caste, Conversion, Narayana Guru.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | 10.51818/SJHSS.10.2019.48-70 | Page: 48-70,
Section: Articles

Gandhi’s Legacy: Vandana Shiva as Gandhi’s Heir

Pius V Thomas is Faculty at the Department of Philosophy, Assam University, Silchar. Areas of specialization are Contemporary Western Philosophy, Critical Hermeneutics, Ethics-Applied Ethics, Theories of Democracy, Religion and Human Rights, Philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. His current research interests are focused on the question of the possibility of contextualizing Human Rights, along with cultural critique, which stimulates themes like Philosophical concepts of Interculturality and Critique, Ethics and Reason, Democracy and Religion, Environmental Ethics and the Philosophy of Education. He has a good number of papers and articles to his credit.

Violina Patowary is M Phil candidate at the Department of Philosophy, Assam University, Silchar. She has published a good number of papers in reputed.

ABSTRACT

The paper highlights the contemporariness and legacy of Gandhian thought in its influence on the concepts of democracy, ethics of plurality and political morality. The paper, however, routes its discussion about democracy to show how it assumes the status of a radical critique of globalized world, global institutions, the environment and nature. The discussion that is carried out in the paper tries to see how a very radical and intimate interlocutor of our time like Vandana Shiva builds up her ecofeminist theoretical environmentalism and the principles of global coexistence and democracy through a paradigm that can be called Gandhian. The paper further argues to show up that the concept of earth democracy, which Vandana Shiva puts forward to mediate a major environmental ethical and socio-political ideal in addressing what we call broadly the environmental crisis, as it articulates an important ecosophical framework, precipitates the Gandhian ideal of Swaraj. The paper, therefore, tries to draw attention to the delicate conceptual positions that Vandana Shiva establishes in her main arguments in linking the global environmental thought or ecological philosophy with the principles of earth democracy and the unique principle of biospherical equality to make them stand in intimate dialogue with the world of Gandhian ideas.

Key words: Political Gandhi, Swaraj, Earth Democracy, Ecological Democracy, Earth Citizenship.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | 10.51818/SJHSS.10.2019.71-81 | Page: 71-81,
Section: Articles

Gandhi in the Tropics: Climate, Disease and Medicine

Bikash Sarma is a Faculty with the Department of Political Science, Salesian College, Siliguri.

The paper draws on a historiography of medicine in India and Gandhi’s engagement with it through a process of qualitative denunciation and qualitative appreciation. To position western medicine in the context of India requires an elaborate historiography underlining a series of knowledge production about the land the colonizer encountered and their constantly changing perception about the landscape, climate, disease and the natives at the contact zone. The paper would attempt to locate the emergence of the discourse on medicine within these changing perceptions of the colonizer and to position Gandhi within this emerging discourse.

Key words: Gandhi, medicine, tropics, climate, disease.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | 10.51818/SJHSS.10.2019.82-90 | Page: 82-90,
Section: Articles

The Violence of Non-violence: Reading Nirad C Chaudhuri Rereading Gandhi

Jaydeep Chakrabarty is Faculty of English, at the Department of English, Assam University, Silchar, India. His areas of interest include postcolonial literatures, critical theory, fiction studies and British literature. He has to credit several papers published in noted journals.

ABSTRACT

The paper tries to explore the conceptuality of Gandhi’s non-violence through its binary opposite violence. The conceptuality of the opposition to their opposites in Gandhi is undertaken in the paper through a reading of Nirad C Chaudhuri’s critique of Gandhi and Gandhism, and taking cue from Jacques Derrida, John Milton and Rabindranath Tagore’s conceptuality of binary opposites. However, this introspection is not at the cost of idiosyncrasy and negation of Gandhi’s core ideology but to make the concept of non-violence express its meaning through its binary opposite.

Keywords: Non-violence, Ahimsa, Silencing, Hinduism, Gita.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | 10.51818/SJHSS.10.2019.91-105 | Page: 91-105,
Section: Articles

Freedom, Authority and Care as Moral Postulates: Reexamining Gandhi’s Proposal for Ethical Reconstruction

Subhra Nag is Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Assam University, Silchar. Her areas of special interest and research are Moral Philosophy, Gender Studies and Philosophical Psychology. She has published several papers in journals and edited volumes.

ABSTRACT

This paper aims at addressing the points of emphasis laid down by Gandhi in the dispersed frame of his ethical thoughts. Our venture tries to draw the scattered elements of Gandhi’s moral thought and ideas in a single frame of analysis and attempts to reflect on the intertwined aspects of them for exploring the potential of an alternative moral stance. Our task is two-fold then: developing a discourse on Gandhi’s understanding of ethics, and going beyond the same to examine its significance in a broader context.

Key words: Freedom, authority, care, ethical reconstruction.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | 10.51818/SJHSS.10.2019.106-128 | Page: 106-128,
Section: Articles

Decoding Gandhigiri: A Genealogy of a ‘popular’ Gandhi

Abhijit Ray is doctoral candidate at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His research interests include politics, representations, and popular culture.

ABSTRACT

This article is about ‘Gandhigiri’- a popular neologism coined by the film ‘Lage Raho Munna Bhai’. It explores the allegorical meaning of the phenomenon. For that purpose, it focuses on Gandhism, Bollywood movies, the content of the film, and certain aspects of contemporary society and culture. As a critic of modernism, many ideas of Gandhi have become more relevant for the post-modernists in the present times. The movie ‘Lage Raho Munna Bhai’ ‘re-engineered’ certain ideas of Gandhi without going to the deeper meaning of Gandhian philosophy. These selective aspects of Gandhi got the populist appeal. However, the popularity of ‘Gandhigiri’ was short-lived and it was soon distorted in the form of memes on the internet. So the article argues that ‘Gandhigiri’ phenomenon is characterised by certain aspects of post-modernism. The article focuses on the different dimensions of ‘Gandhigiri’, but ultimately indicates that the ideas of Gandhi and his persona are still relevant in contemporary times.

Key words: Gandhigiri, Post-Modernism, Bollywood, anekantavada, meme.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | 10.51818/SJHSS.10.2019.129-141 | Page: 129-141,
Section: Articles

Labour for Love or Love for Labour?

Shruti Sharma is a doctoral candidate with CSSSC, Kolkata. Her research interests include Critical geography and gendering of sports.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | 10.51818/SJHSS.10.2019.142-148 | Page: 142-148,
Section: Articles

Production of a ‘degenerate’ form

Vasudeva K Naidu is a Faculty with the Department of English, Salesian College, Sonada.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | 10.51818/SJHSS.10.2019.149-152 | Page: 149-152,
Section: Book Review

Book Review

Irfan Ahmad, Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to Marketplace, (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2018), Rs. 1195, xxv +270, Hbk, (ISBN 0 19 948759 6)

Shofiul Alom Pathan is doctoral candidate with Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. His research interests include questions of identity and violence in contemporary Assam.

The larger project that Ahmad has undertaken in this book is to question the dominant Eurocentric discourse that – Islam is a religion with an absence for the space of critique. He argues that in the twentieth century there has been a cold war between Islam and the West, underlined by the discourse of Enlightenment. The idea of Enlightenment, as contented by Ahmad is a manifested “self-appreciation” and did not necessarily mean a break from the earlier Christian tradition; but rather it was the project of putting ‘progressive’ Protestantism forward to immune the Christian world from any sort of critique. Thus, enlightenment becomes for the author an ethnic project of the German and the French.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | 10.51818/SJHSS.10.2019.153-156 | Page: 153-156,
Section: Book Review

Punam Tripathi, The Vulnerable Andaman and Nicobar Islands: A study of Disasters and Response (New Delhi: Routledge India, South Asian Edition, 2018), Rs. 1495, Pages 354, Hbk, (ISBN 1138323551).

Bipul Chhetri is presently working as an Assistant Professor and Head in the Department of Geography at Salesian College, Siliguri Campus. He has a teaching experience of more than 5 years. He defended his PhD Thesis entitled “Livelihood Adaptability and its Sustainability in the Mountain Ecosystem: Lachung Valley, Sikkim Himalaya” from Sikkim Central University in the year 2019. His area of interest lies in Environmental Geography, Geography of Resources and Population Geography. He has published some of his research work in Journal entitled Deccan Geographers, Indian Journal of Regional Sciences, Asian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences.

BOOK REVIEW

Andaman and Nicobar Island is one of the Indian territories that is known for its natural scenic beauty in terms of its diverse forests cover, the azure sea, white beaches and rich biodiversity. It is one of the most important tourist destinations today. The presence of colonial architecture further adds advantage to the island which makes it more attractive destination for both domestic and international tourist in the region. It is the island inhabited by six aboriginal tribes who were later brought into contact with the population from the mainland India after Independence.

The Island though today presents a glorious picture of its abundant natural resources and rich diversity of flora and fauna however have a bitter history when it is seen in terms of disaster. The tribal population of the region have witnessed multiple forms of disaster which were more of anthropogenic in nature rather than the natural disaster. The author has well documented the human induced disaster in relation to its history in different episodes or phases. Keeping the tribal inhabitants at the centre of the study, the work presents the nature of vulnerability that the tribal population were exposed in three different stages.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2 (Dec 2019)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | 10.51818/SJHSS.10.2019.157-160 | Page: 157-160,
Section: Book Review

Sreetanwi Chakraborty, The Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up (Kolkata: Penprints Publications, 2019), Rs. 350, 144, Hbk, (ISBN 978-93-5361-186-6)

Monika Rana has earned her Masters degree from Visva Bharati, Santiniketan. Currently, she is working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English. She is also engaged in a translation project under Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. Three anthologies of poetry has been published to her credit during her high school days. She continues to write poetry in English, Hindi and Nepali.

Sreetanwi Chakraborty’s thesis on a feminist interpretation of fairy tales came as a surprise and treat to my literary interest. One of my fondest childhood memories is intricately connected with the stories I used to hear as a child. These stories would range from tribal folk tales comprising mermaid to the stories by Grimm Brothers. Back then, I didn’t realize in that small hamlet of Dooars, stories and fables written in Germany would seep into our local households in the form of oral narratives, cartoons and comics. It took me another decade of exposure to various schools of thought to understand the politics of representation in the tales that made our childhood.

The changes in the academia and politics which can be located more prominently in the fin de siècle of the twentieth century led to challenging and reproduction of the previously accepted concepts and ideas associated with representation of women. In this context, works like Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble would be indispensable. The understanding of women and her gender roles assigned by these male authors came under strict scrutiny of the Feminist Literary critics. It is in this premise, we can locate Sreetanwi’s The Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up – A Feminist interpretation of Fairy Tales. As the subtitle suggests, her work argues and challenges various stereotypes associated with the representation of women characters. The stereotyping of women as victims, damsel in distress, agents of darkness has been a common practice in literature across ages and civilization. If the Greeks had Medea and Medusa, the Elizabethans gave birth to Lady Macbeth. The seemingly long title of the book, however, succeeds in laying out the agendas forthright to the readers. The metaphorical ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is no longer ignorant, innocent and in darkness. Short and precise, the book has been divided into four sections. It is inclusive and encompassing in the sense that it takes into account the Russian, German, Czech, Danish, and stories from other regions of the world.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.1 (May 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.v-viii | Page: v-viii,
Section: Editorial

Editorial

Social Distancing, Covid-19, and Experiential Narratives

Bikash Sarma teaches history of ideas and political history at the department of Political Science, Salesian College, Siliguri.

With the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, we have been travelling through turbulent viral times that brought us closer to a sequence of ‘phantasmagoric’ events—for several months now. These experiential and existential dilemmas paved the way for strands of thought and of debates on the thematic of modernity, on quarantine—physical and social isolation— palliative measures, the virulent nature of bio-politics, ways of reconfiguring the relationship between humans and disease/ epidemics, and numerous reflections on/of the self by the locked downs and ups.

The anxious modern-human today is compelled to create a simultaneous space of despair and hope as the unfamiliar non-human mutant replicates inside the human host. With this subjection of the modern human by the non-human mutant, the claim over transcendence of nature has become uncannier than ever. At a time when physical and social borders got epidemiologically fixated, the border crossing between history of pathology and social history has intensified. We, the locked-downs are anxiously turning the pages of these heterogeneous reflections—from digging in bookshelves to searching the world-wide-web and different genres of films—for a glimmer of hope. In epidemiological sense we are engrossed into volumes of medical history on epidemics and in socio-political sense connecting the pandemic from bio-politics of the state to individual solitude, isolation and repression—howsoever, miniscule to comprehend the dystopia.

This anxiety constantly reminds me experientially—and many of the readers would agree to it existentially—of Michel Foucault’s lectures at Collège de France and specifically his classic passage on “Panopticism” from Discipline and Punish. The passage details the methods of surveillance, quarantine and segregation of the population, in the case of plague epidemic in the seventeenth century France. Foucault through the plague epidemic—as a metaphor and as a real historical event—analyses the evolution of the ‘modern’ disciplinary regime of “differential distribution.”1

The archival description in Foucault resonate a model of the disciplinary mechanism that we are witnessing in the midst of the pandemic—as a co-relative to the medical and political discourse, as he writes, “[t]he plague-stricken town, traversed through-out with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies—this is the utopia of a perfectly governed city.”2

Suddenly, the historicity of the plague town in France is being lived through—possibly with the same level of fear and anxiety. As Bruno Latour recently commented: “...by remaining trapped at home while outside there is an extension of police powers and the din of ambulances, we are collectively playing a caricatured form of the figure of biopolitics that seems to have come straight out of Michel Foucault lectures.”3

However, it is the same space of quarantine that not just creates a hierarchy of control, surveillance and suspicion but also a hierarchy of people—with substance and little or no substance. Foucault indeed hints at the precariously segregated life-world—of our times:

Each family will have made its own provisions...If it is absolutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any meeting. Only the intendants, syndics, and guards will move about the streets and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse to another, the ‘crows’, who can be left to die: these are ‘people of little substance who carry the sick, bury the dead, clean and do many vile and abject offices.’4

1 Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by A. Sheridan, (New York: Vintage,1978), 199.
2 Ibid,198.
3 Bruno Latour, “Is This a Dress Rehearsal”, Critical Inquiry Blog, 23rd March 2020. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/
4 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 195-7. Emphasis added.

The selves that would be let to live and those if not let to die; be abandoned or be unleashed with the brute power of the state/family upon their body. Controlling the itineraries of migrant workers—‘sanitizing’ them with chemicals like sodium hypochlorite—and a new wave of domestic violence within home are not just a testimony to the precarious existence of the mere biological bodies, but is evidence of the bodies being trapped into a gendered, casteist, classist, and epidemiological discourse. The biopolitical and biocultural production of the bodies are vindicated by the discourse on contagionism and social isolationism. These bodies are not deprived of politics and culture through suspension, but rather their reworking through medico-technical-social fallacies. The invocation of the metaphor for diseased and dangerous human bodies in the garb of exception is a known phenomenon—as far as the history of epidemics is concerned.

It is with these concerns that the Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences decided to publish a special issue on the current pandemonium, underlining differential impacts of Covid-19.

Suvradip Dasgupta in his paper “Covid-19 Pandemic and the Media: Gendering the Ordeal” draws a critique of the epidemiological reconstruction of gender dichotomy propagated through the ‘Covid portals.’ Taking cue from post stucturalist feminism(s) he attempts to demystify the media’s act of gendering produced in conjunction with gendered medical discourse.

Bikash Sarma and Shruti Sharma in their paper “Covid-19 and metaphor for existence: Notes on Post-lockdown India within ‘home’” attempt to understand the latency of existential defeatism and existential recovery within the Covid-19 reconfigured home. By engaging with the autobiographies of a solitaire of the past and the experiences and expressions of contemporary locked down selves, the paper tries to understand the erasures and silences in the discourse on the self and solitude, and the (im)possibility of tactical manoeuvres on part of the silenced bodies within the quarantine induced domesticity in India.

Anik Sarkar in his paper “Despair and Homelessness in the face of Apocalypse on Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan” re-conceptualizes despair and homelessness through the medium of films in the context of the current pandemic situation. He attempts the introspections through his own quarantine induced self.

Debarati Deb in her paper “Finding the ‘Reboot Code’: A Study on the Future of Indian Economy Post Covid-19 Pandemic” assesses the impact of Covid-19 on the Indian economy. With a careful review of existing literature on political economy the author provides—what she calls a ‘reboot code’—for a post-Covid-19 Indian economy.

Ranu Sherpa in her paper “Covid-19 and Domestic Violence: Reading Masculine Anxiety” develops an empirical case to analyse the co- relatives of Covid-19 domesticity and rising cases of domestic violence. Citing several crucial reports on these factors the author reflects upon this renewed masculine psyche that gave rise to intimate partner violence within the regime of social distancing.

Shruti Sharma in her commentary “Covid-19 and Cricket: Playing with the Contagion and/of Caste” metaphorizes the paradox of licking the leather (cow hide) cricket ball in light of the Covid-19 ICC regulations. The author juxtaposes the rough/tattered side to the shiny one that is nurtured by players using their saliva, mapping this distinction on to the social distance between the producers and  production spaces of the commodity and the consumers/players and spaces of play.

Chawang Dorjey in his commentary on “Technology, Surveillance and the Pandemic” reflects upon the regime of surveillance and epidemic diseases. Drawing upon a Foucauldian genealogy he makes us rethink the connection between governmentality and the current viral times.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.1 (May 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.1-19 | Page: 01-19,
Section: Articles

COVID19 Pandemic and the Media: Gendering the Ordeal?

Suvradip Dasgupta is Assistant Professor (English) at Salesian College Siliguri. He was awarded PhD by Jadavpur University in 2018 for his thesis entitled ‘Masculinity and Nationalism in Bengal: Studies from the Novels of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Thakur’. His areas of academic interest include Gender, Masculinity, Translation, Literatures and Cultures of Bengal.

Abstract

“Death touches the spring of our common humanity,” and so has the covid-19 pandemic. There is hardly a country or a region that has been able to escape its vicious touch. Despite the unique, varying contexts that the pandemic has given rise to in different parts of the globe, the present scenario is also characterized by certain common features. One such significant observation towards which the global media is pointing is based on (binary) gender distinction. Since early April, the internet has been flooded with reports of how men are more prone to death due to covid-19 in comparison to women. The manner of media representation, my paper argues, is also a reinstatement of the male/female gender binary.

The paper analyses this particular drift in the media in conjunction with the postfeminist philosophy of thinkers such as Judith Butler and Tina Chanter whose works point towards a horizon where the accepted notions regarding gender binary and the materiality of the body do not hold. Besides, the paper also analyses how the media is accepting certain notions as ‘given’ and thus operating from a deep seated patriarchal premise that is inconceivable without the gender binary and gender roles.

Keywords: Media representation, sex-gender system, masculinity, post-structuralist (deconstructive) feminism.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.1 (May 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.20-39 | Page: 20-39,
Section: Articles

Covid-19 and metaphor for existence: Notes on Post-lockdown India within ‘home’

Bikash Sarma teaches history of ideas and political history at the department of Political Science, Salesian College, Siliguri.

Shruti Sharma is a doctoral candidate with CSSSC, Kolkata. Her research interests include Critical geography and gendering of sports.

Abstract

The paper attempts to understand the existential defeatism and the recovery of existential meanings that the uncanny Covid-19 pandemonium enacted under the regime of social distancing. The quarantine from the public not only created a dialectics of home and the world but also re-enacted estrangement upon the gendered bodies within the same home metaphor. By engaging with the autobiographies of solitaire of the past and the experiences and expressions of contemporary locked down selves the paper tries to understand the erasures and silences into the discourse on self and solitude and the possibility and impossibly of tactical manoeuvres on the part of the silenced bodies within the quarantine induced domesticity in India.

Keywords: Covid-19, home metaphor, Rousseau, everydayness, gendered bodies.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.1 (May 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.40-54 | Page: 40-54,
Section: Articles

Despair and Homelessness in the face of Apocalypse: on Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan

Anik Sarkar is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Salesian College, India. His recent works include a chapter titled “I am a Tree Leaning: Neocolonialism, Eco-consciousness and the Decolonized Self in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing”, in a book, upcoming from Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield; a chapter titled “Between Horror and Hunger: Reflections on the Medical Poems of Miroslav Holub”, upcoming in a book from Vernon Press, Delaware and a chapter on “Murakami and Videogames” for a book Ready Reader One, forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press. His work of fiction The Man who Sold Diseases, was published by Juggernaut Books, New Delhi, in 2018.

Abstract

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is about Justine and her apparent “schizo-” melancholy, one that shares its name with the planet about to crash on earth. While, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s drama Leviathan, something in-between grandiose and morbid hopelessness is Hobbesian; in the sense that power is monarchically vested but unlike the treatise, rights are not safeguarded and no freedom is guaranteed. It is a retake on the “Book of Job”, but prayers are undertaken with cynicism as the lead character, Kolya’s house is wrecked (literally and symbolically) we find a Church erected in its place while the camera pans to a picturesque landscape wary of the pervasive political corruption and endless human suffering in its immediate vicinity. As individuals are sloshed in vodka and boats lie wrecked on the shores of the city, skeletal remains of a whale mark the enormity of “Leviathan” from which there is no escape.

Even though both these films are surprisingly different in every other aspect, they centre on annihilation; one on the proper sense of the term: complete destruction, the later on the massacre of justice, rights and freedom. Also, “despair” and “isolation” follow one another in close coordinates that reveal the hopelessness of situation and a pervasive condition of “homelessness” - in Melancholia the symbols are strikingly evident while in Leviathan they are literal and obvious. This paper would aim to critically navigate through these films, analysing and comparing them while assessing their connections to “despair” and “homelessness” evident in the running year of the pandemic.

Keywords: Despair, homelessness, cinema, pandemic, hope.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.1 (May 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 |DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.55-72 | Page: 55-72,
Section: Articles

Finding the ‘Reboot Code’: A Study on the Future of Indian Economy Post Covid-19 Pandemic

Debarati Deb is presently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management Studies, Salesian College, Siliguri and is presently pursuing PhD from the University of North Bengal. Her area of research interest includes Finance and Economy.

Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic has not only brought the fear of losing lives but also the financial threat to the world economy. Since the time Lockdown 1.0 has been imposed in India on 23rd March 2020, the economic condition of the country has shaken. The Indian economy has been hit by the pandemic in the worst ways possible concerning consumption, manufacturing, exports and capital flows. There is no doubt that before the pandemic which triggered from China, India has been growing based on these four pillars. This present shock that all human beings have encountered and experienced is broad and deep and has certainly put the world economy into a major setback. However, on the positive note, if challenges can be turned into opportunities backed up by government support, it is worthwhile to mention that the economy will not be the same post-pandemic. The world economy will revive dealing with the “new normal” leading to a “new horizon”. The objective of this research paper is to critically analyse the various dimensions of the Indian economy dealing with the pandemic crisis. The economic areas that are fighting the crisis and struggling hard to revitalize will be evaluated to find positive magnitude. The research work will be based on secondary data and will focus primarily on finding out ways to achieve the “reboot code” for Indian economy post covid-19 pandemic.

Keywords: Pandemic, world economy, Indian economy, covid-19, crisis.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.1 (May 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 |DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.73-84 | Page: 73-84,
Section: Articles

Covid-19 and Domestic Violence: Reading the ‘Masculine Anxiety’

Ranu Sherpa has completed her Masters from North Bengal University, Siliguri in the year 2019. She is presently working as an Assistant Professor in Salesian College Siliguri in the Department of English. Her research interest is Gender and Women Studies and Postcolonial Literature.

Abstract

pandemic has thrust us, is a significant and rapid spike in cases of domestic violence. Over the past few months, there have been umpteen reports of domestic violence. And, as if by default, the victims in almost all such cases are women. Isolation, social distancing and avoiding public space are some of the basic precautionary steps during these viral times. Quite paradoxically, this isolation and distancing allows the socially marginalised and subjugated class to be an easy target. The masculine psyche considers such time as a threat to their identity and in order to regain power and have control in their relationship opts for violence and develops a hostile attitude in order to claim their superiority The paper would try to analyse and reflect upon the important aspect of the ‘masculine psyche’ as it operates within patriarchy and show how this physical restriction and loss of the public sphere creates a sense of anxiety within that masculine psyche, with violence towards their partner as an unfortunate, yet unmistakable, manifestation of this anxiety.

Keywords: Pandemic, isolation, social distancing, masculine psyche, domestic violence.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.1 (May 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 |DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.85-90| Page: 85-90,
Section: Articles

Covid-19 and Cricket: Playing with the Contagion and/of Caste

Shruti Sharma is a doctoral candidate with CSSSC, Kolkata. Her research interests include Critical geography and gendering of sports.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.1 (May 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 |DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.91-95| Page: 91-95,
Section: Articles

Technology, Surveillance and the Pandemic

Chawang Dorjey is an MPhil candidate at Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.1 (May 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 |DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.96-101| Page: 96-101,
Section: Book Review

Book Review

T M Krishna, Sebastian & Sons: A Brief History of Mrdangam Makers, (Chennai: Context, 2020), pp 366, Rs 799, Hbk, (ISBN: 9789389152180).

Shruti Sharma is a doctoral candidate with CSSSC, Kolkata. Her research interests include Critical geography and gendering of sports.

Sebastian & Sons can be read as an exploration of the everyday and ordinary unfolding of social relations—particularly that of caste—in the process of the production of sound for the primary percussion instrument of the Carnatic stage, Mrdangam.Mrdangam is believed to be avedavadyam (Vedic instrument) (p.187), however it is only in the 1920s and 1930s that male brahmins appropriated the instrument into the Carnatic music world and instituted their dominance thereof. The instrument is a cylindrical two-faced drum. The hollow cylinder is made of the wood from a jackfruit tree and the two faces/frames are made of three layers of hides (p.3). The journey of the Mrdangam from the raw materials—collected from forests and slaughterhouses, and assembled at the maker’s homes and workshops—to its finished form, in the player’s puja room or the stage has been descriptively unpacked in this book. Krishna does this by bringing together narratives of Mrdangam makers from different regions in Southern India but predominantly Thanjavur, “the cultural nerve centre of Tamil Nadu” (p.6) with an extensive focus on Sebastian’s family—who are from the Dalit Christian community—and within it the master of makers, the magical Parlandu. The modality of collecting the narratives is that of personal—telephonic and face to face—interviews. Krishna has called the book project a documentation of the lives of ‘invisible keepers’ of the tradition of Mrdangam making and has relied primarily on oral history and memory of the makers and a few players. Through the book, Krishna also provides an intense description of the material process of producing the Mrdangam, and a reader might feel the need to go through the highly skilled process twice over to get a grasp of it.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.1 (May 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 |DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.102-105| Page: 102-105,
Section: Book Reviews

Book Review

Saba Hussian, Contemporary Muslim Girlhoods in Assam: A study of Social Justice, Identity and Agency in Assam, (New Delhi: Routledge, 2019), pp 148, Rs. 9340, hbk, (ISBN 9781138606449).

Shofiul Alom Pathan is doctoral candidate with Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. His research interests include questions of identity and violence in contemporary Assam

The larger project that Hussain has undertaken in this book is to understand the subjectivities or subjective possibilities available to understand Muslim girls in Assam and how they negotiate with those in their everyday life. These subjectivities are interrogated among school going girls through inquiring educational policies, taking narratives of teachers and parents. Hussain’s book appears to be a timely intervention in several aspects. She takes up a hitherto unexplored anthropological issue. In the existing body of academic literature, Muslim subject and subjectivities are discussed more in terms of politics/political rather than as a subject matter of anthropological enquiry. There is a lack of understanding of Muslim female subjectivities in Assam and Hussain’s intervention is an in-depth analysis to bridge that gap. There exists a multiple and intersecting differences among Muslim females in Assam in terms of class, and linguistic identity, along with the ‘popular’ native muslim/migrant Muslim binary. Hussain considers these multiple and crucial aspects while interrogating the subjectivities of Muslim school going girls in the town of Nagaon, Assam.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Vol. XI, No.2 (Dec 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 Section: Contents

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.2 (Dec 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.v-viii | Page: v-viii,
Section: Articles

Editorial

Social Distancing, Covid-19, and Experiential Narratives II

Bikash Sarma teaches history of ideas and political history at the department of Political Science, Salesian College, Siliguri.

As we are steering through an unprecedented epoch of Covid-19, desperate attempts have been made to renew existential meanings as an underside to the unbridled meaninglessness and existential defeat in the world outside.

As the “everyday familiarity collapse[d]” and uncanniness or ‘un-home-like’ took over, the spatially constrained and temporally disoriented self began an anxious search for the “metaphor for existence.”1 Post the global lockdown to ‘tame’ the virus, home has become the site where the metaphor for existence is materially and discursively situated: either being at home or longing for one, as with the case of thousands of migrant workers in India who have walked miles—some to death—in search of this metaphor.

Martin Heidegger contends: In anxiety one feels ‘uncanny’. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to expression: the “nothing and nowhere”. But here “uncanniness” also means “not-being-at-home” ...Being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of the “not-at-home”. Nothing else is meant by our talk about ‘uncanniness.’

In uncanniness, the self flees from the “threat to its everyday lostness”—a withdrawal from the ‘publicness’ and from the absorption in the world - even “though the very world itself is still ‘there’, and ‘there’ more obtrusively.”3 When the conceptuality—of the uncanny situation and human condition as a result of the former—is itself evasive, a metaphor not only provides the epistemological reserve for the constitution of existential concepts, but also points “back towards the connection with the life-world as the constant motivating support...”

On a similar note Leela Gandhi has made an important point on the conceptuality of a phenomenon. Apart from an expressed skepticism towards almost everything, there has emerged, “a state of consciousness about things we have known for a very long time without bringing to the forefront of understanding...It is an orientation to what is already there but so much in plain view as to be unintelligible”.

With these two crucial themes for the viral times—finding a metaphor amidst growing scepticism and for re invoking a consciousness for long distorted, we at Salesian College Publications set the journey to publish a second issue on “Social Distancing, Covid-19, and Experiential Narratives.”

George Thadathil in his paper “Pain: The Door to Agony and Ecstasy in Time of Covid-19 Pandemic” locate pain—mental and physical—at the intersections of spiritual-philosophy and  contingencies of viral agony. Through an extrapolation of dialectics of vipassana as mode of being and becoming, the paper situates pain through the exegesis of experience and the current pandemic—as an expression immanent within healing.

Saravanan Velusamy in his paper “Media, Power and the Pandemic: Production of Fear, Discipline and a Distraught Self” tries to understand the role of media during pandemic times and decipher the kind of self it produces given media’s strong influence in interpreting the world for its viewers.

Abhijit Ray in the paper “Indian workers in Dubai: City, Fear and Belongingness” analyses two contradictory human experience—belongingness and fear in the context of Indian workers working in Dubai during the pandemic. He argues that the pandemic magnified certain aspects of the workers working in Dubai that often remain invisible in the popular public domain.

Soroj Mullick in “Befriending the Broken Body: Understanding the Post-Pandemic Body” approaches the impact the pandemic has had on innumerable human bodies, with a philosophico-theological reflection, building on the biblical insights into the human body and the changes it has undergone within Christian tradition.

Paul Punii & Dominic Meyieho in their paper “The Poumai Naga agricultural festivities and rituals vis-a-vis folklores: Covid-19 pandemic application” harping on the ethnographic details of Poumai Naga agricultural festivals underlines the impact of Covid-19 on these rituals.

Augustine Joseph et.al. in their paper, “A Longitudinal Study on the Psycho-Sociological Impact of COVID -19 lockdown on College Students & Faculty” brings an assessment of the fear and anxiety among the faculty and students of Salesian College. From the data accumulated through a series of online questionnaires, the paper analyses the impact of the lockdown on a diverse range of indicators—that includes boredom, aspects of the future, sociality—conducted with a group of faculty and students of the college. Anmol Mongia in her general commentary “Will the Circus come to town? : Indian Circus Arts swinging between a Kafka moment and a nouveau moment” explores the hope of revival for the once esteemed performing art form—Circus—both as an art form and a life tool.

Vasudeva K. Naidu in the general commentary “Boredom, time and the creative self during a lockdown” explicates on the conceptuality of boredom through a literary-philosophical journey during the lockdown.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.2 (Dec 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.1-12 | Page: 1-12,
Section: Articles

Pain: The Door to Agony and Ecstasy in Time of Covid-19 Pandemic

George Thadathil is the Principal of Salesian College, Sonada and Siliguri. He is the author of Vision from the Margin and has edited and co-edited number of books besides contributing to a number of journals and edited volumes. He is the founder Director of Salesian Publications, Salesian Research Centre and Salesian Translation Centre.

Abstract

The paper attempts to locate pain - mental and physical - at the intersections of spiritual-philosophy and contingencies of viral agony. Through an extrapolation of dialectics of vipassana as mode of being and becoming, the paper situates pain through the exegesis of experience and the current pandemic - as an expression immanent within healing.
Keywords: Pain, vipassana, spiritual-philosophy, pandemic, being.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.2 (Dec 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.13-33 | Page: 13-33,
Section: Articles

Media, Power and the Pandemic: Production of Fear, Discipline and a Distraught Self

Saravanan Velusamy is an M.Phil. Candidate at the Center for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Abstract

Pandemic needs a globalized world where we have to live with the risks that come with it. Television is a crucial communication device that shapes public perception and mediates our comprehension of the outside world. It also forms part of the ideological apparatus that aids in reproducingthe dominant perception of reality among the masses. This article is based on observations made of the TRP-driven TV content produced during the lockdown period, in order to interpret the meaning that a projected reality produces. The article intertwines both: how government uses television to bring order as they tackle the situation and how advertisement on the other hand promote sales during crisis, both of which tries to convince the ‘consumer-citizen’ that these are extraordinary times but normalcy is returning. The objective of this paper is to understand the role of media during pandemic times and decipher the kind of self it produces given its strong influence in interpreting the world for its viewers.

Key Words: TRP-driven media, power, pandemic, fear and discipline, self.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.2 (Dec 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.34-54 | Page: 34-54,
Section: Articles

Indian workers in Dubai: City, Fear and Belongingness

Abhijit Ray teaches media studies at Salesian College, Siliguri.

Abstract

Even though the pandemic is portrayed in the popular narrative as a collective experience of humankind, it affected different sections of people of different spectrums indifferent ways across the world. The workers from India and other south Asian countries are living in the megacities like Dubai in the Gulf region for generations. The outbreak of the pandemic suddenly shuttered the economic arrangement of the workers carefully designed by the host and home countries over the decades. The article has mainly focused on two contradictory human experience— belongingness and fear in the context of Indian workers working in Dubai during the pandemic. In this particular time, the eagerness for ‘going back home’ was driven by these two seemingly contradictory human emotions. The focus is entirely on Dubai—which is considered by many Indians as an extended part of India. The article points out that the pandemic magnified certain aspects of the workers working in Dubai that often remain invisible in the popular public domain. The pandemic suddenly exposed the vulnerability of the workers living in foreign cities. There are chances that the pandemic experience will have a long-lasting impact on the life of the workers and the whole economic and political arrangement of the city like Dubai.

Keywords: Fear, Dubai, belongingness, pandemic, lockdown, laborers.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.2 (Dec 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.55-76 | Page: 55-76,
Section: Articles

BEFRIENDING THE BROKEN BODY
Understanding the Post-Pandemic Body

Soroj Mullick has a Licentiate in Faith Education and a Doctorate in Christian Education from the Salesian Pontifical University, Rome. He is a former faculty of Salesian College Sonada, and has written number of research papers and articles. His area of academic interest includes religion, Theology, and youth Psychology. Currently he serves as co-pastor at Bandel Basilica.

Abstract

The paper approaches the impact the pandemic has had on innumerable human bodies, with a philosophico-theological reflection, building on the biblical insights into the human body and the changes it has undergone within Christian tradition. The paper asserts that the notion of perfection on which the Christian ideals of sanctity was created over the centuries have had its negative impact in delimiting the sin dimension of being human, to the body, and in the body, to the sexual. The contemporary issues of gendered body, sexual orientation and identity, seeking expressions across the globe within the western modernity and its aftermath in the rest of the world, through the colonial expansionism needs a critique and the pandemic does a cleansing not only of the physical world but also of the inner psychic world of the post-pandemic human is what the paper delineate.

Keywords: Sexuality, gendered body, sin, pandemic, spirituality.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.2 (Dec 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.77-105 | Page: 77-105,
Section: Articles

The Poumai Naga Agricultural Festivals and Rituals vis-a-vis Folklores: Covid-19 Pandemic Application

Paul Punii is a research scholar from Assam Don Bosco University Dominic Meyieho is an Assistant Professor at Assam Don Bosco University

Abstract

The traditional Poumai Naga People are basically agrarian and their lives revolve around it. Poumais are distributed into Paomata, Chilivai, Lepaona, and Razeba. As agrarian people they sow paddy; Daonü, Tainü, Marunü, Louka are festivals to usher the sowing of paddy. Duh is the ritual celebration for good seed. Paoki is the feast of plantation. Laonü is the post plantation festival. Nge is ritual celebration asking God to preserve the paddy from the attack of pestilence. Baoloutouyu is the prayer for abundance and eating of the first fruits. Thounü is the New Year thanksgiving celebration with abundance of food and wine. The festivals and rituals that preserve a community act as a deterrent to exceptional events like the Pandemic in the community history is a subterranean argument in the paper.

Keywords: Festivity, folklores, pandemic, Poumai rituals, agrarian practices.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.2 (Dec 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.106-122 | Page: 106-122,
Section: Articles

A Longitudinal Study on the Psycho-Sociological Impact of COVID -19 Lockdown on College Students & Faculty

Augustin Joseph has been an educator and educational administrator for over a decade. Currently he is pursuing PhD in educational leadership.
James Molekunnel Chacko is a Clinical Psychologist and practicing Counselor. He is HoD of Psychology, PG Coordinator and Associate Professor at Salesian College, Siliguri.
Paramita Datta, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Salesian College Siliguri. She is the affiliate member of American Psychological Association & Associate member of Indian Psychiatric Society.
Patrick Johnson teaches in the Department of Management, Salesian College, Siliguri.
Rachel Salomit Sitling is the Head of Department of Sociology at Salesian College, Siliguri Campus. She has a B.A degree in History and a Master degrees in Sociology and History
Sumina Chettri, Assistant professor, Head of the department of BSW, Member of the board of BSW, Member of the exam committee.

Abstract

As we are travelling through the ambiguous viral times, the papers attempts for a preliminary assessment of the fear and anxiety among the faculty and students of Salesian College. From the data accumulated through a series of online questionnaires, the paper analyses the impact of the lockdown on a diverse range of indicators—that includes boredom, aspects of the future, sociality—conducted with a group of faculty and students of the college.

Keywords: Pandemic, Salesian College, psycho-social impact, boredom, anxiety.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.2 (Dec 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.123-129 | Page: 123-129,
Section: Articles

Will the Circus come to town? : Indian Circus Arts swinging between a Kafka moment and a nouveau moment

Anmol Mongia teaches at the Department of Sociology, Salesisn College, Sonada.

Circuses in India and elsewhere are both an art form and a life tool. As most observers of the Indian Circus are sounding its death knell, this article explores if there is still hope of revival for the once esteemed performing art form.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.2 (Dec 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.130-134 | Page: 130-134,
Section: Article

Boredom, time and the creative self during a lockdown

Vasudeva K. Naidu teaches English literature at Saleisan College, Sonada.

Boredom has always been an integral part of human life but it seems it acquired a renewed meaning during this pandemic. The global lockdown that was brought about and is still prevalent in most parts of the world till date, confined the individual self to a particular space, bringing the ‘human’ in terms of interaction and socialisation to a grinding halt. This boredom which started out as either a result or a lack of a specific activity—has acquired a new depth as one continues to find one’s self confined to a particular space and within a fractured sense of clock time, which the modern self was not privy
to.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.2 (Dec 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.135-140 | Page: 135-140,
Section: Book Reviews

Book Review

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive
Accumulation (Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 2004), Rs. 1585,
Pages 288, pbk, (ISBN 1570270597).

Shruti Sharma is a doctoral candidate with CSSSC, Kolkata. Her research interests include Critical geography and gendering of sports.

To understand the socio-political significance of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (hereafter, Caliban), one must go back to the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaigns in the 1970’s. The campaign was a transnational social movement which battled for a salary for housework, given its strategic importance to the capitalist economy through the reproduction of the next generation of workers and the care of the current generation with no direct cost to the State or the market.1 In 1975, Fedirici produced a “revolutionary” pamphlet titled “Wages against Housework” challenging the pillars on which the patriarchy of wage rests which dealt with how women are socialized to become good wives who provide a “labour of love.”2 In 1984, she co-authored the book The Great Caliban: History of the Rebel Body in the First Phase of Capitalism with Leopoldina Fortunati which examined the reorganization of housework, family life, child raising, sexuality and male-female relations during sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Caliban deals with similar ideas but differs in its scope as it focuses on a different period in history, that of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In the Preface, Fedirici also connects her arguments to the contemporary changes she witnesses during her stay in Nigeria. As she writes:

In Nigeria I realized that the struggle against structural adjustment is part of a long struggle against land privatization and the “enclosure” not only of communal lands but also of social relations that stretches back to the origin of capitalism in 16th-century Europe and America

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XI, No.2 (Dec 2020)
ISSN: 0976-1861 | DOI: 10.51818/SJHSS.11.2020.141-148 | Page: 141-148,
Section: Book Reviews

Book Review

J. P. Gurung, All in a Cup of Tea (Sonada & Siliguri: Salesian College Publications, 2020), Rs 699, pp. xviii+206, Hbk, (ISBN 978-93-82216-19-3)

Samip Sinchuri is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology in Salesian College Sonada.

Darjeeling in popular discourses has a unique place for its tea. All in a Cup of Tea is an insider’s account on Darjeeling’s Tea Plantations. The author belongs to a family involved in tea management for generations. J.P. Gurung has attempted to throw some insights on the details of the tea gardens in Darjeeling as they stand today. He has shared his personal experiences as a tea planter. In the words of Harsh Vardhan Shringla “…perhaps for the very first time a planter has attempted to piece together history along with his long years of firsthand experience …” The author has tried to take a peep into the life of a tea planter - his club, his life style and habits with ample anecdotes and hilarious incidents.

In chapter I, “History of Darjeeling Tea” Gurung has vividly given the historical account of how tea seeds were brought from China and introduced in Darjeeling on an experimental basis and subsequent historical trajectory of the plantations. The British got this tract of land from the regional rulers and began to develop the place as an army outpost and also as a place where expatriates could escape from the heat and dust of Gangetic Bengal which was under East India Company (p. 2). Britishers were driven by the prospect for tea business in Darjeeling. The author has also accounted the expansion and growth of the tea plantations starting with the successful tea experimentation to commercial plantation—which had proved to be a profitable venture.