An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Bharti Arora (Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow 2022):
Decolonial Praxis of Land Rights: Peasants’ Negotiation with the Nation-State
Reading Phanishwarnath Renu’s Parati Pari-Katha (Story of Wasteland 1957) and Shrilal Shukla’s Bisrampur ka Sant (Saint of Bisrampur 1998), my presentation will foreground themes of land rights and agricultural reform across caste, class and gendered contexts of post-independence India. The presentation argues how Hindi village fiction, produced on and around the revolutionary decades of the 1960s-70s, maps the complex character(s) of peasant movements in India. It further emphasises the disparate political and aesthetic orientations of selected Hindi fiction vis-à-vis peasantry and their centrality to the democratic imaginary. These narratives have hitherto been analysed only through the perspectives of Gandhian nationalism, regionalism (anchalikta) or disenchantment (mohbhang) vis-à-vis the Nehruvian regime or Communist abstractions/ extremism. The presentation instead will problematise these perspectives on village life and peasants’ agitations by probing their everyday negotiations, exclusions and claims for land rights and equality (caste-gender-economic) vis-à-vis the institutional structures of the state from the perspective of decoloniality. By doing so, it will establish how the fiction discursively re-constructs the state as a symbolic and cultural terrain of meaning-making endeavours. This will facilitate to expose the “fissures of the dominant order, its decolonial cracks” (Walsh p.24) which might help forging “struggles - political, epistemic, and existence based- against the colonial matrix of power” (p.24) and the allied network of state institutions.
Work cited:
Walsh, Catherine E. “The Decolonial For: Resurgences, Shifts and Movements.” On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics and Praxis. Duke University Press, 2018. pp. 15- 33
Please note that this seminar has been rearranged due to strike action, and will take place on Thursday 7 April.
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2