Academic Articles by Prem Poddar
Transdisciplinary Thinking from the South (London and New York)Routledge, 2021
Introduction: future of water …water, by assuming different forms, becomes this earth, sky, heave... more Introduction: future of water …water, by assuming different forms, becomes this earth, sky, heaven, mountains, gods and men, cattle, birds, herbs and trees, all beasts down to worms, midges, and ants. Water itself assumes all these forms. Meditate on water (Chāndogya Upanis. ad 7.10.1).
John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2020
Focusing on migration, translation and diaspora-formation, my chapter explores how Gorkha writing... more Focusing on migration, translation and diaspora-formation, my chapter explores how Gorkha writing both crystallizes and problematizes postcolonial identities. Gorkhaness hinges on a fulcrum of ambivalence as it seeks to articulate a separate cultural identity away from Nepal and relocate itself within the citizenry and national culture of India. The iconic Darjeeling writer Indra Bahadur Rai narrates Gorkha subjectivity as it attempts to recast itself within the Indian matrix, riddled as it is by ethno-nationalist demands, including the cry for a Gorkhaland. Questions of translation in a transnational context in the Himalayas, I argue, has become the central concern in the writers I discuss. These writings enact a process of 'alienation and of secondariness in relation to itself". Rai comes across as a Gorkha nationalist/ethnicist, but the necessary ambivalence of his text ends up imagining and rewriting a more inclusive community.
Oxford University Press, 2019
Heidelberg University Publishing, 2017
Historically identifiable contact between Kalimpong and in-coming Chinese migrants occurred... more Historically identifiable contact between Kalimpong and in-coming Chinese migrants occurred, at the latest, in the early twentieth century. This essay makes reference to some of the interfaces and events involved, but chiefly focuses on the three phases in which Kalimpong emerged in the Chinese communist consciousness, especially the period between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s. The representations of Ka-limpong in the Chinese language Renmin Ribao (hereafter People’s Daily) of this time clearly embody the anxieties, fears, and suspicions that the Chi-nese government harboured about the foment and ferment of socio-polit-ical encounters with their locus in “Galunbao” (噶伦堡 or Kashag ministers’ fortress). From a town hosting the Chinese trade agency and an “idyllic” (or tianyuan田园) place where the Dalai Lama and the townspeople met, to its transformation into a “nest of spies” (a term used by both Nehru and Zhou Enlai) where “Indian expansionists,” “American and British imperial-ists,” and “Tibetan rebels” rubbed conspiratorial shoulders, Kalimpong was finally represented after 1962 as the place where Indian authorities were in cahoots with the Kuomintang, and put the local Chinese through the wringer. Using colonial archives, untranslated Chinese material, and sec-ondary published sources together with recent interviews and field notes, the essay analyses these narratives, marked as they are by an ambivalence about the place’s vernacularly cosmopolitan character. The hill station also emerges as a barometer and metonymic stand-in for the problematic rela-tionship between China and India.
Heidelberg University Publishing, 2017
Whether produced as an ethnographic account or a fictional narrative, Kalimpong is ultimately su... more Whether produced as an ethnographic account or a fictional narrative, Kalimpong is ultimately subject to the problematics of represen-tation. It is, after all, at the interstices of history, ethnography, literature, and the scientific discourses employed in the service of governmentality, that we find the production of subjectivities, catalogued communities, and an emergent politics of resistance. This essay is an attempt to look at the difficulties in reading/writing this place in the optic of the two traditions of imaginative literature and ethnography, and of a monstration recounted through the prism of a particular novel. Inseparable from this is the ter-minological difficulty inherent in forging Nepali or Gorkha identity. This is evident in the production of rather unwieldy devices indicative of some distance from the historical homeland of Nepal in the form of lexicons such as Indian-Nepali, नेपामुल भारतीय (Nepamul Bharatiya), भारतीय-गोराखाली(Bharatiya-Gorkhali) or भरगोली (Bhargoli). Gorkhaness has increasingly become synonymous with Indian Nepaliness, but only invests in degrees of differential commonalities with Nepaleseness and diasporic Nepalese-ness. While this counters the irredentism of a Greater Nepal thesis, it can-not completely exorcise the seductive spectres of ethnic absolutism for diasporic subjects. Rather than just looking at the work of “Nepali” writers who narrate Gorkha subjectivity as it attempts to relocate itself within the matrix of the Indian nation, riddled as it is by ethno-nationalist demands, including the continuing cry for a Gorkhaland, this essay instead focuses on the question of reading/writing (itself a practice) in Kiran Desai’s Book-er winning The Inheritance of Loss, a novel which, penned by a dialogically cosmopolitan writer, became notorious for its narration of a post-1980s Kalimpong in flux.
Akademisk Kvarter, 2016
Amartya Sen has at various times referred to the Indian fourth cen-tury BCE thinker Kautilya. Kau... more Amartya Sen has at various times referred to the Indian fourth cen-tury BCE thinker Kautilya. Kautilya’s treatise Arthaśāstra (literally the ‘science of economy or material wellbeing’) explored possibili-ties of social choice. My paper attempts to delineate the connec-tions between Sen’s deployment of (and sometimes dissatisfaction with) ancient Indian rational thought, in particular the ethical im-plications of Kautilya’s arguments about the welfare of the people: “in the happiness of the subjects lies the happiness of the king [i.e. the state] and in what is beneficial to the subjects his own benefit. What is dear to himself is not beneficial to the king, but what is dear to the subjects is beneficial (to him).” How the notion of wel-fare is defined and what specific measures are advocated and put in place is as central in Kautilya’s work as it is differentially central to our own times. Ultimately, both Kautilya and Sen are acutely aware that just institutions do not necessarily ensure social justice, however it is conceived.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2010
This essay investigates the cultural and political genealogy of the passport in the 19th
century,... more This essay investigates the cultural and political genealogy of the passport in the 19th
century, as a document that sought to secure the rights of European national citizenship.
Examining the historical case of Malika Kishwar (or Jenabi Auliah Tajara Begum), the
Begum of Oudh, who led a delegation to London to petition the Queen and parliament
against the annexation of Oudh, it shows how liberal concepts of the rights of citizenship
were contradicted and undermined by the treatment of imperial “subjects” in Britain.
These vexed themes of national-colonial legitimacy, which presage postcolonial
immigration debates, are simultaneously traced in a reading of Satyajit Ray’s film The
Chess Players (1977), which adapts a short story by Premchand to interrogate the rigged
diplomatic game of annexation in northern India prior to the 1857 rebellion.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2008
This paper examines Greenlandic Inuit identity in relation to the Danish national imaginary by
... more This paper examines Greenlandic Inuit identity in relation to the Danish national imaginary by
critically reading Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1997). We argue that Høeg’s
positioning of a postcolonial Inuit migrant in the metropolitan centre enables, albeit limitedly,
a critique both of Danish imperialism and narrative constructions of Danish national identity.
Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2006
The discourse of development or modernization and of ‘national integration’ or ‘nation-building’
... more The discourse of development or modernization and of ‘national integration’ or ‘nation-building’
in India is inseparable from issues surrounding education and culture and their incorporation in
definitions forged during colonialism. In this article I look primarily at the Kothari Commission
Report (KCR) of 1964–66 and the New Policy on Education (NPE) proposals of 1986. These two
documents, between them, chart the entire discursive territory of projected developments in postcolonial
India. Ambitious in conception, they are blueprints for the transformation of a society. I
focus on the relation between the NPE and KCR as evidence of policy and education in India, and
attempt to relate them to previous proposals by Gandhi and others and to my own theoretical
preoccupations, particularly those regarding discourse and counter-players.
Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, 2004
Journal for Cultural Research, 2003
Delineating the complex relationship between state, nation and culture in India, the paper examin... more Delineating the complex relationship between state, nation and culture in India, the paper examines the discourses that are produced to define what culture is in the life of the nation. Shared epistemic assumptions in colonial and postcolonial writings tend to constitute a veritable silence on structural social inequalities and marginalized identities. Articulated in a deceptively self-evident and "neutral" framework, this silence disavows real divisions in the body politic and then, in a contradictory reversal, celebrates them as natural and inevitable. It is the discursive regularities in the movement from the colonial to the national that the paper mainly takes issue with and shows how notions of the "people" and "nation" are installed.
Journal of American Ethnic History, 1999
Reviews three books which "reflect on our natural and necessary pre-occupation with migrancy as ... more Reviews three books which "reflect on our natural and necessary pre-occupation with migrancy as a common signifier of identity as difference": 1) "The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience," by Meena Alexander (South End Press, 1996, 223 p, $15); 2) "From the Outer World: Perspectives on People and Places, Manners and Customs in the United States, as reported by Travelers from Asia, Africa, Australia, and Latin America," edited by Oscar Handlin and Lilian Handlin (Harvard University Press, 1997, 491 p, $55/$24.95); and 3) "New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage," edited by Alpana Sharma Knippling (Greenwood Press, 1996, 386 p, $75).
Aarhus University Press, 1998
Books by Prem Poddar
Edinburgh University Press, 2008
Uploads
Academic Articles by Prem Poddar
century, as a document that sought to secure the rights of European national citizenship.
Examining the historical case of Malika Kishwar (or Jenabi Auliah Tajara Begum), the
Begum of Oudh, who led a delegation to London to petition the Queen and parliament
against the annexation of Oudh, it shows how liberal concepts of the rights of citizenship
were contradicted and undermined by the treatment of imperial “subjects” in Britain.
These vexed themes of national-colonial legitimacy, which presage postcolonial
immigration debates, are simultaneously traced in a reading of Satyajit Ray’s film The
Chess Players (1977), which adapts a short story by Premchand to interrogate the rigged
diplomatic game of annexation in northern India prior to the 1857 rebellion.
critically reading Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1997). We argue that Høeg’s
positioning of a postcolonial Inuit migrant in the metropolitan centre enables, albeit limitedly,
a critique both of Danish imperialism and narrative constructions of Danish national identity.
in India is inseparable from issues surrounding education and culture and their incorporation in
definitions forged during colonialism. In this article I look primarily at the Kothari Commission
Report (KCR) of 1964–66 and the New Policy on Education (NPE) proposals of 1986. These two
documents, between them, chart the entire discursive territory of projected developments in postcolonial
India. Ambitious in conception, they are blueprints for the transformation of a society. I
focus on the relation between the NPE and KCR as evidence of policy and education in India, and
attempt to relate them to previous proposals by Gandhi and others and to my own theoretical
preoccupations, particularly those regarding discourse and counter-players.
Books by Prem Poddar
century, as a document that sought to secure the rights of European national citizenship.
Examining the historical case of Malika Kishwar (or Jenabi Auliah Tajara Begum), the
Begum of Oudh, who led a delegation to London to petition the Queen and parliament
against the annexation of Oudh, it shows how liberal concepts of the rights of citizenship
were contradicted and undermined by the treatment of imperial “subjects” in Britain.
These vexed themes of national-colonial legitimacy, which presage postcolonial
immigration debates, are simultaneously traced in a reading of Satyajit Ray’s film The
Chess Players (1977), which adapts a short story by Premchand to interrogate the rigged
diplomatic game of annexation in northern India prior to the 1857 rebellion.
critically reading Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1997). We argue that Høeg’s
positioning of a postcolonial Inuit migrant in the metropolitan centre enables, albeit limitedly,
a critique both of Danish imperialism and narrative constructions of Danish national identity.
in India is inseparable from issues surrounding education and culture and their incorporation in
definitions forged during colonialism. In this article I look primarily at the Kothari Commission
Report (KCR) of 1964–66 and the New Policy on Education (NPE) proposals of 1986. These two
documents, between them, chart the entire discursive territory of projected developments in postcolonial
India. Ambitious in conception, they are blueprints for the transformation of a society. I
focus on the relation between the NPE and KCR as evidence of policy and education in India, and
attempt to relate them to previous proposals by Gandhi and others and to my own theoretical
preoccupations, particularly those regarding discourse and counter-players.