Critical South Asian Studies

Front Matter

2023-08-09

Tagore, Nationalism, and Cosmopolitanism: Perceptions, Contestations and Contemporary Relevance

Om Prakash Dwivedi — 2023-08-31

The Famine Projects and Digital Trauma Studies in India

Pramod K Nayar — 2023-08-31

In this essay, I examine two aspects of the twin projects’ foregrounding of trauma: the modes of representing trauma in the digital and the consequent construction of a trauma globalectic. Preserving, and in many cases, retrieving, cultural trauma in the digital age as Famine and Dearth and Famine Tales demonstrate, will mean a media archaeology that merges different forms and genres of/in media. Conjoining instances of social injustice and suffering, as these projects do across spatial and temporal spaces ensures that we see historical trauma in multiple sites and stemming from different forces and causes and yet following certain patterns – social hierarchies, unequal legislation, administrative inefficiency/indifference, all of which conspire to produce food scarcity and famine.

The Other Diaspora: South Asian Migrants in The Gulf States

Lava Asaad — 2023-08-09

Temporary People (2017), a collection of stories by Deepak Unnikrishnan brings to light the forgotten and ignored experiences of South Asian work migrants in the Gulf States. Those immigrants are simultaneously excluded from their home country and from the Emirati society, deemed by both as redundant and disposable. The precarious situations of these immigrants are aggravated by a fraught socioeconomic and ecological structures at home (forever deprived of human and civil rights) and in the host country (always considered an Other, a foreigner). Those migratory routes to the Gulf have not been included within South Asian diasporic discourse as those laborers have ambivalent relationships with the homeland. Unnikrishnan, once a Gulf boy, now lives in the USA, sheds light on contested meanings of being a “Pravasi” away from “Veed”. In this article, I examine the ways in which South Asian laborers in the Gulf are groundless beings with fragile roots back in the homeland in selected stories in Temporary People.

Of Women, Gay Men, and Dead Cats: The Precarity of Neoliberal Aspirations in Made in Heaven (2019).

Megha Anwer — 2023-08-31

Written by Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti, and Alankrita Shrivastava, the first season of the nine-episode web series, Made in Heaven, premiered on Amazon Prime Video on 8 March 2019 to great acclaim, garnering praise for being both “daring and revelatory” in its “provocative exploration of gender, marriage and love” and for offering “binge-worthy television” (Qureshi). In this essay, we examine how Made in Heaven investigates women’s lives as they navigate precarity, a distinct and historically contingent condition produced by neoliberalism in India. It does so by especially paying attention to the configurations of precarity produced through the intersectional workings of gender and class simultaneously. We argue that the show maps the ubiquity of precarity as it permeates and engulfs all life but ends with offering alternatives to perpetuating neoliberal logics of precarity and precarization by suggesting other possible worlds of solidarities, love, and care.

Generic Hybridity, Narrative Polyphony and Uncanny Slums in Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

Angelo Monaco — 2023-08-31

Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple (2020) centres on the mysterious disappearance of children from the basti of an Indian shantytown, thus immersing the reader into the climate of injustice, grievability and vulnerability of contemporary India. Anappara’s debut novel may be described as a coming-of-age narrative with elements of fantasy and crime fiction. It uses various focal perspectives, relying particularly on the ingenuous gazes and voices of the children from the basti. In my article, I will first explore the formal texture of Anappara’s novel, laying emphasis on its generic hybridity and multi-voiced narrative organization. Then, I will examine how the interface of precarity and resilience is thematised through a focus on the particular topography of the city, emblematic of the issues of grievability and vulnerability of present-day India. I will then conclude by showing how in Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line story-telling may be considered as an act of resistance in a world of social injustice.

Precarity, Climate Change and Migrant Labour Amitav Ghosh’s Eco-Aesthetics

Binayak Roy — 2023-08-09

Migrant workers play an increasing role in Asia, where they are both remarkably mobile and largely disorganized. The workers’ position leaves them disempowered within the workplace; it also leaves them vulnerable in the world outside. In this sense, migrant workers lead lives that are, in Hannah Lewis’s view “hyperprecarious”. The celebration of the collective has been a recurrent trope in Ghosh’s oeuvre, and this article seeks to shed light on the formation of communities of migrant labourers in a transnational space in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island. It explores the heterogeneity of exploitative labor conditions, their situatedness as well as their “lived experiences” documenting the variegated landscape of neo-slavery for vulnerable migrant workers. It also highlights how Amitav Ghosh interrogates the ways in which the Western colonial episteme has commodified nature, land, mountains, and ecology in his most recent writing.

Editorial

Om Prakash Dwivedi — 2023-08-31