Remembering to forget: Birsa Munda and memory politics in India

The question of the state has come to occupy a central place in recent debates on subaltern politics in contemporary India. Against those critical voices that have claimed that the emancipation of subaltern groups can only proceed by challenging and moving beyond the modern Indian state, a range of scholars and commentators have asserted that it is precisely by seeking to harness the state that social movements can hope to advance their oppositional projects. Intervening in this debate, this article argues that although these new perspectives constitute a decisive advance in terms of developing a relational understanding of subaltern politics in India, questions pertaining to the structural constraints that social movements face in advancing their oppositional projects through the institutions and discourses of the state are still neglected. The article addresses these questions through a detailed exploration of the ways in and extent to which Adivasi movements have managed to democratize local state–society relationships in western Madhya Pradesh, and discusses the conceptual and political lessons that can be drawn from these experiences. Drawing on recent advances in Marxian state theory, the article argues that it is necessary to move beyond the theoretical impasses of both anti-statism and state-centrism and toward a politically enabling engagement with contemporary Adivasi mobilization in India.

Th is article explores the articulations of citizenship in subaltern politics in contemporary India. Departing from Karl Marx’s acknowledgment that, despite its limitations, political orders founded on the modern democratic conception of citizenship had propelled “real, practical emancipation,” I argue that citizenship has to be understood as simultaneously enabling and constraining radical political projects and popular social movements. I flesh out this argument through a detailed analysis of Adivasi mobilization in western Madhya Pradesh, India. My analysis shows how the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan, a local social movement in the region, democratized local state-society relations by appropriating basic democratic idioms and turning these against local state personnel and the violent extortion they engaged in. Drawing on James Holston’s work on “insurgent citizenship,” I argue that claims making around such democratic idioms inflected citizenship with new and potentially emancipatory meanings centered on local sovereignty and self-rule. I then detail how this mobilization provoked a substantial coercive backlash from the state and discuss the lessons that can be gleaned from this trajectory in terms of the possibilities and limitations that citizenship offers to progressive popular politics in India today.

This chapter describes the Indian Communist left and their struggle to maintain a discrete distance between their Marxism and the increasingly dominant role played by Hindu beliefs in Indian politics, associated with the hegemony of the governing BJP. While in previous decades it was productive for Indian Marxism to emphasise its secular character, since this comported well with the dominant trends of post-independence political discourse, the rise of Hindu nationalism has made this separation appear as a source of tension and led some Communist politicians to disclose their religious affiliations and beliefs as part of their political and electoral strategies. Reflecting on the challenges of this situation, Bradbury concludes that a progressive Marxist articulation of Hinduism along the lines of movements discussed elsewhere in this collection may be out of reach.

Introduction - the Editors. A Geographic Preface - A.K. Dutt. The Historical Context - M. Bhagavan. The Nationalist Movement - P.B Mehta. Indian Politics - S.D. Sharma. International Relations - S. Ganguly. India's Economy - J. Adams. The Role of Women - B. Crosette. Population, Urbanization and the Environment - H. Simms. Religion in Contemporary India - A. Embree. Caste - V. Pingle. The Arts and Popular Culture - A. Lal. Trends and Prospects - the Editors.

Enforced Loyalties:Caste Panchayats and Caste Politics in India Anagha Ingole (bio) INTRODUCTION Loyalty is an attitude and form of behavior reflecting one's allegiance to another individual or to a group. I will be concerned entirely with loyalties to a group, and the group that is my particular focus is caste. As we normally think of it, the attitude or actions that get described as "loyal" are agentive—that is to say, they are held and done voluntarily, even when they are done unreflectively. So the word "enforced" in the title might seem, at least at first sight, to be an unusual qualifier of the term "loyalty." Yet we are surrounded by structures of sociopolitical norms and constraints that create visible or invisible enforcement mechanisms, which in turn generate loyalty. Examples abound, ranging from the crude (McCarthyite browbeating into nationalist allegiance) to the more subtle (trade union solidarities that are shaped by, for example, the stigma attached to crossing picket lines). Caste, as a longstanding and entrenched hierarchical social phenomenon in India, may seem an obvious example of such enforced loyalty. Hierarchical systems, quite generally, are preserved by those higher up in the systems, ensuring that loyalty is enforced upon all others. Caste is no exception to this. But my interest is not primarily in the enforcement of caste loyalty on these grounds, persistent though such enforcement may be, despite the relative undermining [End Page 765] of social hierarchies by the development of modern democracy in India. In fact, I will not be concerned with enforced loyalty to the caste system but rather with loyalty to particular castes by caste members; i.e., intracaste loyalty. And I will explore the role of "caste panchayats,"1 or intracaste councils, which enforce such loyalty. With them, too, the enforcement mechanisms range from the crude and violent (such as ordering honor killings of caste members for noncompliance with caste norms) to the more subtle (the use of what has come to be called the method of "social boycott"2). This enforcement of intracaste loyalty and these panchayati agencies of its enforcement present a picture of what caste itself has become in contemporary India. While making these preliminary remarks, let me present in the briefest terms a very general background of the nature of caste and caste panchayats. Since the subject (and phenomenon) of caste is one of the most complex in the social sciences, anything I say is bound to be utterly rudimentary, intended only to facilitate the points of detail and argument that the paper will develop. Caste, as is well known, is a birth-based system of social stratification. It is routinely said to have taken three forms over time. (This taxonomy has not gone without question in the scholarship on the subject, but it is useful to proceed within a short paper, as it gets things very broadly right.) The first form is caste as varna, or the fourfold division of society into the priestly class of Brahmins, the warrior class of Kshatriyas, the traders called the Vaishyas, and the manual laborers known as the Shudras. The varna is a system of graded hierarchy (with Brahmins at the top and Shudras at the bottom) based on principles of "pollution" and "purity." The Untouchables or Ati-Shudras are left out of this fourfold system and are considered to be maximally polluting. This hierarchical classification claims ancient pedigree and a scriptural basis. In the second sense, caste exists as jati, an endogamous subgroup of one or another varna. (Sometimes jatis spanned more than one varna, but this became less frequent as an indirect effect of the classificatory practices of the census introduced by British colonial [End Page 766] rule, which demanded more rigid specifications.) Jati, as a subgroup, is characterized by similar commensality practices in which intermarriage is almost always permitted, while there are complex taboos surrounding marriage and dining across jatis. Much of the enforcement of loyalty within castes is motivated to keeping things in line regarding such practices so as to preserve endogamy. A jati frequently maps onto a particular occupation. Thus, for example, in a given region there might be a jati consisting of barbers or weavers...

In November of 1999, one year after the brutal murder of Rita Hester, a black transsexual woman in Boston, Massachusetts, transgender activists in Boston and San Francisco organized a candlelight vigil in Hester's memory to raise awareness of anti-trans violence. Hester's murder came just six weeks after Matthew Shepherd was killed in Wyoming, a murder case that lit up the U.S. news media and drew international attention. In contrast, Hester's death was overlooked in most mainstream media, and local news sources - even those self-identified as gay - repeatedly referred to Hester as "he” and insisted on using her birth name, putting "Rita” in quotes. Such media representation, along with minimal police response to Hester's case, prompted the initial memorial on the first anniversary of her death. Alongside the vigil, the individuals behind Gender Education and Advocacy (GEA), a national Internet-based non-profit organization, set up a new component on their website, gender.org: "Remembering Our Dead.” The site, which lists information about individuals who have died as a result of anti-trans violence, is intended to call attention to the system of transphobia and to publicly memorialize those lives lost to it. Eight years later, the vigil has grown into an annual, international event. The dual nature of the Day of Remembrance - existing both on the Internet as an ongoing obituary and in "real life” as a collection of local memorial services - makes it an especially rich site for analysis. I am interested here in the Day of Remembrance as a cultural project of public mourning and memorial, a project invested in uniting trans communities through a shared sense of vulnerability and through a seemingly unconstrained mode of communication technology: cyberspace. In this article, I am concerned with the relationships between memorials, nationalisms, and state violences, and how these relationships are at work in the Day of Remembrance specifically. How does a public demonstration of grief also function as a citizen-making project? How might appeals to the state for justice and for human rights reinforce U.S. nationalism, despite the memorial's intent to unite trans people across national borders? Moreover, in what ways is cyberspace cast as the primary tool that enables the memorial project to cross those borders? In pursuing these questions through the specific site of the Transgender Day of Remembrance, I wish to argue broadly that the cyber memorial, while appearing to transcend social and cultural differences, in fact is intimately tied to nationalisms and state violences - indeed, it is the very refusal to critically engage with these concepts, and to attend to the ways that national identities and relations of power unevenly affect trans subjectivities and communities, that helps position the memorial as a nationalist project.

Transgender Day of Remembrance has become a significant political event among those resisting violence against gender-variant persons. Commemorated in more than 250 locations worldwide, this day honors individuals who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. However, by focusing on transphobia as the definitive cause of violence, this ritual potentially obscures the ways in which hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality constitute such acts. Taking the Transgender Day of Remembrance/Remembering Our Dead project as a case study for considering the politics of memorialization, as well as tracing the narrative history of the Fred F. C. Martinez murder case in Colorado, the author argues that deracialized accounts of violence produce seemingly innocent White witnesses who can consume these spectacles of domination without confronting their own complicity in such acts. The author suggests that remembrance practices require critical rethinking if we are to confront violence in more effective ways.

This paper examines the changing nature of Muslim political mobilization in contemporary India in the context of Hindu nationalism’s ascendancy into power and the consequent crisis of traditional Muslim politics. Through an ethnographic case study of the Popular Front of India, we argue that a qualitatively new form of political mobilization is taking place among Indian Muslims centered on an articulation of “self-defense” against a “Hindu nationalist threat.” This politics of self-defense is constructed on the reconciliation of two contradictory processes: use of extensive legal pragmatism, and defensive ethnicization based on Islamic identity. The paper also examines the consequences of the emerging politics of competing ethnicization for even a normative and minimal idea of secularism and how it contributes to the process of decoupling of secularism and democracy in contemporary India.

This paper explores the intricate relationship between postmodernism and political discourse in present-day India. It delves into how key postmodern concepts—such as the fragmentation of ideas, the decentralisation of authority, and a growing scepticism towards overarching ideological narratives—have come to shape the Indian political landscape. These influences are particularly visible in the growing dominance of media, the rise of identity-based politics, and the spread of populist rhetoric. In the Indian scenario, the effects of postmodern thought can be observed in the increasing prominence of regional, caste-based, and community-specific identities, which challenge the notion of a unified political ideology. Furthermore, the digital age has facilitated the growth of highly individualised and expressive political voices, amplified through social media platforms. This has led to a political environment where multiple, often conflicting, truths coexist, and narratives are continuously shaped and reshaped. Such dynamics have contributed to a shift away from traditional political paradigms, fostering a more fluid and per formative form of political expression. The research also examines how Indian political discourse now frequently merges ideology with spectacle, blurring the lines between reality and representation. Drawing on the insights of key postmodern thinkers, this study highlights how cultural imagery, remained historical narratives, and identity symbols are being strategically deployed in political communication. These tools not only serve electoral purposes but also redefine the public’s engagement with politics. Finally, the paper investigates the implications of these postmodern developments for democratic practices, political accountability, and civic participation. It suggests that understanding these trends is essential for grasping the evolving nature of governance in India. By applying a postmodern lens, the study offers a fresh perspective on how power, identity, and discourse intersect in contemporary Indian politics. Keywords: Postmodernism, Political Discourse, India, Identity Politics, Media, Populism, Democracy

In the past few years, Hungary has been portrayed as a negative example of memory politics in both mainstream and academic press, charged with being the “ground zero” for a paradigm change in World War II memory politics that was echoed in Poland when the right-wing populist PiS government passed its infamous law on criminalizing certain perspectives in historical research. The reshaping of historical discourse was also manifested in four institutional changes in Hungarian academic life within a short period of time. In this chapter, the author claims that there are three plausible frameworks of interpretation of Orban’s memory politics: distortion, revisionism, or paradigm change. He explains recent developments in Hungarian memory politics in terms of a paradigm change. The historiography of the Holocaust could move forward substantially if it analyzed the causes, institutional forms, and main actors of oblivion.

Facing an increasing number of deaths among its rank and file in the wars against Japan and the Kuomintang (Nationalists), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began to promote the cult of the red martyr during the late Yan'an era, and then developed it in a systematic fashion after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. In the 1950s, the CCP cultivated the cult to honour those who had died in the revolution with commemorative practices such as the launching of the Martyrs' Memorial Day and the building of a national cemetery — the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery — in the western part of Beijing as a place of national pilgrimage. The cult served the purposes of diverting attention from the destruction of war, justifying armed conflict as a means to fight enemies, providing psychological comfort for the bereaved, and, finally, educating future generations about socialist goals, serving, in the words of Zhou Enlai, 'to commemorate the dead and inspire the living'. However, the CCP's political aims did not always dominate how the cult was interpreted, for the bereaved often expressed less political and more emotional views about their grief and personal loss. In recent years, as revolutionary fervour wanes and material gains have come to dominate the lives of the Chinese people, war memorials have fallen into oblivion. The cult is rapidly losing its influence, and, with that, the Party's ability to control its people is deteriorating.

Women perform the vast majority of the necessary socially reproductive labour. As workers engaged in performing socially reproductive labour, women may be divided into three broad categories: homeworkers, domestic workers, and scheme workers (workers employed in different state-sponsored programmes/schemes). While domestic workers can be categorised as being purely informal workers, the scheme workers work at the intersection of formal and informal labour because of the peculiar terms of their employment. Unlike homeworkers, both domestic workers and scheme workers do receive ‘wages’, but the nature of the ‘wages’ received by them makes them distinct from other formal and informal sector workers. By exploring the socio-political role played by wage relations in the lives of the socially reproductive workers, this paper analyses the nature of socially reproductive labour in India, and its relationship to the broader class structure. Using original fieldwork data, and a combination of Marxist-Humanism, Autonomism, and Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), the paper highlights the various socio-economic and political contestations surrounding the working-class identity among the socially reproductive workers, and their implications for broader working-class politics in India.

Over the past decade, there has been a burgeoning interest in two overlapping areas of the humanities and social sciences: memory and geography or, more specifically, the study of human space. Both of them have spawned an extraordinary amount of interesting work, work that has in effect created new fields of study and inquiry. The concern with memory, for example, has branched out to include such increasingly prevalent forms of writing as personal memoirs and autobiography, which nearly every fiction writer of note has attempted, to say nothing of the outpourings of academics, scientists, public figures, and so forth. The national fixation on recollection, confession, and witness has run the whole gamut from public confession-as in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal-to various studies of the meaning of collective memory, extended reflection and analyses of instances of it, plus numerous chronicles embodying it. I shall have more to say about that later. In addition, and somewhat on the margins, has been a serious, sometimes bitter inquiry into the authenticity of certain memories, as well as, at the other, calmer end of the spectrum, a remarkable academic analysis of the role of invention in such matters as tradition and collective historical experience. Some examples of intense and even anguished controversy are the following: Was Anne Frank's diary really hers, or was it so altered by publishers, members of her family, or others in its published form so as to conceal the disturbances in her domestic life? In Europe there has been a great and often acerbic debate over the meaning of the Holocaust, with a whole range of opinions as to what happened, why it happened, and

Inspired by historic protests in India’s capital city, New Delhi, queer and Sikh choreographer Mandeep Raikhy devised The Secular Project in 2020. The Secular Project is a performance work and an archive that exists as a series of short reels, posts and story highlights on Instagram. This article analyses The Secular Project as a dissident social practice and the dancing body as a mode of dissent against majoritarian nationalism. I critically reflect on the notion of secularism in the Indian context and where it stands in reference to the rising religious fundamentalist politics in India. I ask: How is secularism embodied and enacted by its citizens, both in private and public spaces, in contemporary India? How does the dancing body intervene or help us understand the values of a democracy shifting into an authoritarian regime? I employ ethnographic research methods – participant observation, qualitative interviewing and field notes – with choreographic analysis of the work on social media to address the politics of secularism and corporeal dissent in this work. I argue that Raikhy’s choreographic work not only brings activism and dance together but also exemplifies the connection between individual dissent and desired collectivity for social change.

Animals are instrumentalised as symbols, objects, and commodities in the construction of diverse subaltern and elite human identities and identity politics in India, through their imposed identification with various human groups, with enduring implications for animal and human (in)justice and wellbeing. Species, as itself as an axis of social difference, and therefore of identity, however, has hitherto rarely been considered as a core facet of identity politics in Indian political life, despite its central role in shaping the inclusions and exclusions that characterise society. This Theme Issue aims to open the space for animal identities to become political, allowing for a critical multispecies politics of identity. To this end, it asks: In what ways can animals be centred as a core part of democratic political life? What are the consequences of doing so? In other words, what opportunities or concerns emerge with the institutionalization of species difference as an identity category? And last, in what ways does a multispecies approach to identity politics impact the analysis of (in)justice in its varied forms in contemporary India and beyond?