Suchergebnisse

Cultural Studies needs to be reinvented for India - a polity where the larger part of the population are disenfranchised non-citizens. The terrain of 'culture' here being differently constituted, manners could serve as a useful category for theorizing this difference. Included in 'manners' are a different historical formation of subjectivity as well as another ontology of representation. Further, Cultural Studies, so conceived, could productively interrogate that excess of Indian political/public culture which cannot be penetrated by disciplinary political theory. This article is a plea for a Political Cultural Studies.

This photo-essay analyzes the politics of dwelling of the inhabitants of 'outcast' Calcutta - the city that is the nightmare of urban planners and whose squalor, filth and poverty are taken to be indexes of the failure of the postcolonial urbanism as such. The city that turned itself into a barricade during the street-fighting years of the 1960s is now about to turn its back on its own subalterns (migrants from poorer areas), participating in urban cleansing drives that derive from neo-liberal dictates. Showing that the squatters also dwell and forge solidarities underpinned by an ethic of survival, this essay draws attention to non-state political formations emerging out of the negotiations of the City Form with the non-civic but enabling life-forms prevalent in subaltern Calcutta.

Like all great cities, Calcutta has its share of catty rumors, many of which are about Calcuttans themselves. One of these runs as follows: Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897–1999), the noted Bengali Anglophile and man of letters, visited England for the first time sometime in the late 1950s. Out on the streets of London, Niradbabu started navigating his cab like a veteran Londoner. What the driver found incongruous was the fact that Niradbabu mentioned some landmarks which no longer existed. It was explained to him that these had either been demolished or bombed during the War. Now, how did he know about the city so well without ever setting foot in England? By his own admission, he was brought up to consume England as an ever-present entity, "very much like the sky above our head," in his remote ancestral East Bengal village, largely through books, pictures, and newspapers.

Home and the World: Travel, Translation and the Home in Bengali Modernity Placing ourselves at the vanishing point of market "globalisation", this article is aimed at analysing how "modernity" came to the Indian people, particularly Bengalis, based on a reading of travelogues ranging over two and a half centuries, from the late 18th century to the early 19lh century. The successive generations of travellers that formed as such ; in relation to the British occupation each : had its own system of historicity. Through these systems, a plan gradually crystallised to remodel time and space by rooting modernity in everyday life. By dissociating the descriptions of the "exterior" "public" sphere - institutions, production systems, education, etc. - from those of the "interior" - home: women.', family, etc.. - the field of action in which the tension of identity and of nationalist « education occurs, the authors of these travelogues contributed to the emergence of a "vernacular cosmopolitanism"' founded on a modern self that persisted in thinking of itself as non-western.