Hindu Studies Commons^™

For A Lost Drachma: Contesting Hindutva Subjectivation In India’S Universities, Bhavika Sicka

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

The aim of this essay is to apply Michel Foucault’s ideas on power and the practice of freedom to the context of India’s increasingly neoliberalized higher education landscape. The essay revisits Foucault’s notion of subjectivation to analyze the cultural politics of the Hindu Right, which, through organized violence and self-disciplinary mechanisms, has attempted to masculinize, privatize, saffronize, and brahmanicize the nation-state (and the public university), erase the othered body from the nation (and campus spaces), and shape how individuals understand themselves, their identities, and their modes of being in relation to savarna-capitalist power and knowledge. This essay will also suggest …

The Question Is Not, 'Can The Subaltern Speak?' The Question Is, 'Can She Be Heard?': A Review Of Lata Mani's Contentious Traditions: Debate On Sati In Colonial India, Laxman D. Satya

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In this powerful book Lata Mani argues that the sati debate in the early nineteenth century marginalized its very subject, i.e., the widow. The book systematically dissects the ideas of colonialists, nationalists, traditionalists and Christian missionaries and attempts to draw a simile between them. Taking a clearly subaltern feminist approach, it provides a post-colonial critique of all forms of knowledge to date. The most vehement critique is reserved for the very idea of modernity itself. "Nationalist ideology secularized and domesticates the rationality of colonial modernity" (p. 6) contends the author. Through the medium of post-nationalist, post-orientalist, and post-colonialist …