A guest blog by Dr Bharti Arora (Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow 2022) on Decolonial Praxis/es of Solidarity in South Asian Literary and Cultural Discourses on Social Movements, a hybrid workshop held on 27-28 April 2022:
The two-day workshop, supported by the Susan Manning Workshop Fund from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh explored decolonial praxis/es of solidarity in South Asian literary and cultural discourses on social movements. The workshop sought to probe how South Asian literary and cultural discourses represent the making, unmaking, and remaking(s) of solidarity among citizen subjects, who agitate for their rights vis-à-vis the hegemonic discourses of the nation states. Such an exploration becomes significant to challenge what Walter Mignolo (2018) calls “the colonial matrix of power” (141), and ways in which this matrix creates and enforces a regime of domination, management and control of South Asian states and their indigenous resources.
The first day comprised presentations by four invited speakers. Prof. Saugata Bhaduri (Jawaharlal Nehru University) foregrounded the polycolonial matrix of Bengal, arguing how pertinent its understanding was to explore multifarious decolonial movements in today’s new-imperial world of continued multinational colonization. Prof. Nishat Zaidi (Jamia Millia Islamia) examined Intizar Husain’s fiction as a site that enacts an ethical performative responsibility to different identities, without any attempt to totalise or to otherize those identities. She argued that Husain’s fiction may be deemed as a site for the construction of planetary ethics that debunks identity politics of West-centric notions of the ‘nation.’ Dr Etienne Rassendren (St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore) presented on non-fictional and literary works of Sri Lankan writers Rohini Mohan, Cheran Rudhramoorthy and Yasmin Gooneratne to configure the nature of the fugitive as exile and the exile as fugitive. By so doing he showed how the diaspora and its mourning are linked to a transgressive social and cultural politics, forging an alternative understanding of solidarities in the process. Dr Brahma Prakash (Jawaharlal Nehru University) explored the epic and narrative of Bhima Koregaon, foregrounding the idea of cultural justice. He argued how the narrative ‘betrays’ the standard narrative of decolonial scholarship, that is, the native versus the colonials and thus offers an alternative discourse of decolonization in India and South Asia.
The second day opened with Prof. Someshwar Sati’s (University of Delhi) talk on Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People. He argued how the novel acts as a metaphor for the horrors of the Bhopal gas tragedy (1984). The representation of the so-called deformed bodies of the victims of the tragedy provides the narrative with potent, subversive and emancipatory loci for forging alternative modes of solidarity that go well beyond the normative conceptions of identity endorsed by the nation and a transnational economic world order. It was followed by an absolutely enriching panel discussion by the University of Edinburgh faculty Dr Talat Ahmed, Dr Hugo Gorringe, and Dr Ayaz Qureshi on the topic “Decolonial Praxes of Solidarities: Perspectives from Social Movements in South Asia.” Dr Ahmed spoke about the 1968 movement in Pakistan which resulted in the toppling over the dictatorial government of Ayub Khan. Having explained the contexts of the movement in detail, she argued however, that there has been a systematic appropriation of the popular movements discourse, in the guise of nationalism, by conservative governments across the world. This has severely affected possibilities of struggles from below. Dr Gorringe spoke on the attempts made by a Dalit party called Liberation Panthers (Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi) who have been mobilising in support of federalism and joined hands with people across the country on the basis of solidarity and a shared commitment to linguistic diversity. He argued that grass roots, decolonial and postcolonial praxis requires us to shift attention to sub national movements rather than national movements. Dr Qureshi spoke on the movement for ‘health citizenship’ in Pakistan in past two decades. He drew on community health workers’ (Lady Health Workers) and young doctors’ struggle in Pakistan for recognition of their labour and for saving the public sector healthcare system from privatization. The panel discussion raised important issues pertaining to decolonial praxes of solidarity, inviting rigorous discussions among the panellists and audience. There were two panels specifically meant for students’ presentations that ranged from Adivasi cultural practices of environmental conservation, literary representations of solidarity, digital art and protest movements. The Valedictory talk was delivered by Prof. Amina Yaqin (Exeter University) who shared insights from her latest book "Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing" (2022) that engages with progressive women’s poetry in Urdu and how it negotiated postcolonial politics. In her talk, Yaqin analysed the literary works of radical Pakistani poet Fehmida Riaz and her centrality to the discourses on decolonization discourses in Pakistan.
I thank IASH for supporting and sponsoring the workshop, and providing an excellent opportunity to facilitate discussions on the said theme. I further plan to bring out a special volume based on the presentations made during the workshop, as part of the Contemporary South Asia journal.