India, like the rest of the world, is faced with two crises. One is the immediate, once-in-a-century Covid-19 crisis and its attendant economic contraction, and the other is a gradually unfolding long-term environmental crisis of climate change with its economic implications. India's political and economic policymaking institutions must cope with these tremendous challenges in the immediate moment and over the longer term.
About the Seminar:
(English captions & Hindi subtitles available)
In 1992, when film historian Richard Schickel, at the behest of the Academy Awards committee, produced a montage based on Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s film clips, he was forced to request footage from the British Broadcasting Corporation and Channel 4 in the UK, as America had none.
Was Ray’s work already a passé “relic of a bygone” or was the presence of universalism—a distinct marker of Ray’s cinema—improbable for the times?
Any discussion on Muslim politics in contemporary India would remain entirely meaningless if two popular, and in a way, conflicting meanings of the term political representation were not taken into consideration. In a more general sense, Muslim representation is evoked as a normative ideal. It is argued that the adequate presence of Muslim MPs and MLAs in legislative bodies ensures the smooth and effective functioning of democratic polity.
Muslims in India are presently enduring a seemingly endless cascade of hate, violence, harassment, and demonization. While studying the ongoing struggle of Indian Muslims, there is a tendency to fall into one of two traps: victimization or romanticization. While the former renders Muslims devoid of all agency, the latter puts a sheen of glorification on what is hardly a winning battle. The reality lies somewhere in the middle.
Ranjini Basu is the Garware Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Advanced Study of India (UPIASI). Her research interests include agrarian studies, peasant movements, rural transformations, and food governance. As part of the fellowship, she will be studying contemporary agrarian politics and ecological concerns in rural North India.
About the Seminar:
The demolition of alleged unauthorized properties in the “Muslim-dominated” quarters of Jahangirpuri (New Delhi), Khargone (Madhya Pradesh), and Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh) by government authorities underlines the nature of administrative discourse toward Muslim identity and space in contemporary India. While Muslim space has always been a contested category in the realm of official administrative discourse, this new bulldozer politics is a relatively new phenomenon.
In 2018, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi addressed a media conclave and outlined the reasons behind the party’s drubbing in the 2014 elections.
