South Asian Studies: Culture

Abstract

This article discusses culture—the term and the object—as they figure in scholarly and intellectual debates within South Asian studies. It traces the movement of the term through three variants of a paradigm: (a) tradition and modernity; (b) culture and development/modernization; and (c) globalization and local cultures and across various disciplines, including Indology, anthropology, sociology, art history, gender studies, etc. While the above variants of a paradigm are all located on an international plane, the study of culture also figures prominently within the national intellectual space. Here studies of caste politics in contemporary India, the relations between gender and culture, cultural rights and identity, and politics and culture, as well as studies that fall within the purview of contemporary cultural studies, including film studies, studies of modern popular culture forms like music and photography, etc. are discussed, together with the contributions to the debates of discourses like feminism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, aesthetic modernism, etc.