Indian Public Sphere Research Articles

Writing Confucian History in an Indian Language

Abstract This article uses a case study of an Urdu translation of the classical Chinese Shujing (Book of Documents) to bring to light a process of multiperson, mediated, and ultimately transimperial translation in which European source texts played crucial roles in transmitting detailed knowledge of China to the Indian public sphere. After outlining the theoretical approach of transimperial history and its value for Asian intellectual history, the article positions the Urdu Shujing in relation to earlier Indian and Middle Eastern accounts of China whose triangulated transmission—from East Asia to Europe and thence to South or West Asia—set various precedents for the translation of the Shujing from a prior English translation. The article then focuses on the Urdu version to reveal the transimperial mechanisms it used to not only translate and transliterate classical Chinese, but also to “transcalculate” dates and render Chinese history comparable to both Europe's and India's past. The conclusions argue that, from Ming China via the early modern Catholic empires to the occult subcurrents of British colonial culture, the transimperial pathways along which Confucian history reached India were ultimately Eurasian rather than narrowly inter-Asian in scope. This reliance on earlier European translations would later recur with the spread of “world literature” in the postcolonial era.

Converts, Bible Women, and Girl Graduates: Emerging Visions of Indian Christian Womanhood in Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna (1889–1890)

ABSTRACT: Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna (1889–1890) is an autobiographical novel by one of the first Indian women to attend medical school in Madras. Saguna is a New Woman narrative of spiritual and social development for both its protagonist and the emerging Indian Christian community. Written in English, it was serialized in the Madras Christian College Magazine , a periodical reaching British, Anglo-Indian, and Western-educated Indian readerships regionally, nationally, and in Christian missionary networks throughout the Empire. Satthianadhan investigates the origins of Indian Christian womanhood in Indian Christian conversion narratives and professional work, especially the mission-sponsored Bible Woman. Critiquing the ways in which female converts and Bible Women retain limited personal agency or occupy lowly positions in the community, Satthianadhan presents her protagonist as a New Woman who draws on the Bible Woman’s example of bold preaching and her own liberal education to ground her beliefs about society and religion in independent, rational thought. Satthianadhan promotes Indian women’s education reform as a movement to be embraced by the Indian Christian community and as a means through which its women can join theological conversations and champion social reform efforts in the larger, male-dominated, Indian public sphere.

Converts, Bible Women, and Girl Graduates: Emerging Visions of Indian Christian Womanhood in Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna (1889–1890)

ABSTRACT: Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna (1889–1890) is an autobiographical novel by one of the first Indian women to attend medical school in Madras. Saguna is a New Woman narrative of spiritual and social development for both its protagonist and the emerging Indian Christian community. Written in English, it was serialized in the Madras Christian College Magazine , a periodical reaching British, Anglo-Indian, and Western-educated Indian readerships regionally, nationally, and in Christian missionary networks throughout the Empire. Satthianadhan investigates the origins of Indian Christian womanhood in Indian Christian conversion narratives and professional work, especially the mission-sponsored Bible Woman. Critiquing the ways in which female converts and Bible Women retain limited personal agency or occupy lowly positions in the community, Satthianadhan presents her protagonist as a New Woman who draws on the Bible Woman’s example of bold preaching and her own liberal education to ground her beliefs about society and religion in independent, rational thought. Satthianadhan promotes Indian women’s education reform as a movement to be embraced by the Indian Christian community and as a means through which its women can join theological conversations and champion social reform efforts in the larger, male-dominated, Indian public sphere.

‘Distorting the history’: Padmaavat and the performative production of history in Indian popular culture

ABSTRACT Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat, a Bollywood period drama, engendered a variety of conversations about identity, history, etc. in India. This article examines the ways in which the reception of the film performatively produced a genre of history in the Indian public sphere. Such performative productions of history as a genre runs counter to the prevalent notion of history as pre-given with concrete referents and past incidents. The allegation of “distortion” (of “history”) is mobilized as a psychoanalytic resource to demonstrate this point. In the process, I note how the existing approaches to Hindu nationalism are inadequate in their critical clarity.

Subaltern Public Theology: Dalits and the Indian Public Sphere, written by Raj Bharat Patta

Subaltern Public Theology: Dalits and the Indian Public Sphere, written by Raj Bharat Patta

The Metamorphosis of the Public Sphere in India over Time: Unfolding the Dichotomy between Public and Private Spheres in the Pre and Post-Independence Era

The public sphere in India has undergone significant changes during colonial rule and the national movement, leading to its susceptibility to the recent rise of Hindutva. The current state of the public sphere in India is shaped by the ambiguities of the national movement, which were influenced by nationalist responses to colonial rule. To fully understand the public sphere, its relationship with the private sphere must be considered, as the public sphere’s definition and shape are derived from this relationship. To institutionalize multiculturalism in the public sphere, it is necessary to renegotiate the relationship between the public and private spheres. Therefore, it is imperative to explore ways to recreate the public sphere in a manner that reflects the country’s diversity effectively.

Retrieving Lost Texts: Early Persian Newspapers of Bombay

Abstract While the study of the history of print culture in India is still at an early stage, languages moribund in India, like Persian, have been all but ignored in this narrative. Persian newspapers of the nineteenth century, especially from its first half, played an important role in the development of the Indian public sphere. To a certain extent, they continued in the vein of the pre-British akhbārs, while on the other hand, they took on gradually the character of a modern newspaper. Bombay (Mumbai), for historical and geographical reasons, emerged as a center of Persian language activity during this period and its rapidly burgeoning printing infrastructure facilitated the development of Persian, as a language for books and newspapers. Using a range of contemporary government records and newspapers, an attempt is made here to reconstruct the history of these early Persian newspapers. Over a dozen Persian newspapers are identified, most of them for the first time; a preliminary attempt is made to understand the impact of these newspapers and the motivations of their Parsi, Hindu, and Muslim editors.

Expanding public debate? Examining the impact of India’s top English language political talk shows

As a genre, current affairs talk shows occupy a distinct space within the Indian television universe. Typically built around a single host and invited guests, talk shows constitute a relatively inexpensive format that most news channels deploy to market themselves. Although the extent to which such shows enhance the potential of rational-critical debate has been widely investigated in Western contexts, their implication for public deliberation remains unclear, at least in the case of India. Through an ethnographic content analysis (ECA) of such shows as represented by Newshour aired on Times Now and The Debate aired on Republic TV, this article explores the presentation styles adopted by these programs and their content both in terms of the participants invited and the range of topics discussed. This research found that instead of enabling meaningful deliberation on a variety of important civic issues, television talk shows in India were fixated on promoting religious majoritarianism, defending the policies of the Modi government, and advocating hyper-nationalism. Further, employing a combative style and polarizing tone, talk show hosts were found to stifle dissenting voices and forestall free expression. Ramifications of such blatant partisanship among current affairs talk shows for the Indian public sphere are discussed.

Dalit Humanism: Marginal Spatial Reality as a Site of Dalit Counterpublic in Bama’s Sangati and Tulsiram’s Murdahiya

In India, one of the major counter-discourses constituted to critique the culture of violence, silence and impunity, harboured by the Indian public sphere, is offered by Dalit literary writings. Dalit counterpublic highlights the alternate cultural spaces that subvert and disrupt the dominant structures of repression by valuing the Dalit standpoint. The present article claims that the Dalit counterpublic is subaltern as well as locational; subalternity is based on the marginal position prescribed to Dalit people in the Indian social and cultural structure while location refers to the geopolitical territorial segregation. Bama’s Sangati and Tulsiram’s Murdahiya have been analysed using theoretical perspectives of counterpublic proposed by critics such as Nancy Fraser, Kanika Batra and Michel Warner. The findings suggest that Dalit people have transformed Dalit marginal site into a source of resistance.

Rethinking Education and Democratization of the Public Sphere in India

Democratization has brought about a tremendous impact on the rigid social structure in post-colonial India. Modern education has been a key factor in transforming society, especially the deep-seated traditions of social inequality and harsh realities of discriminatory practices. Given the deepening and widening of inequality in the post-reform era, this paper seeks to explore the significance of rethinking the critical realm of education in transforming India's public sphere as a vital tool for the democratization of society and a proposal for an inclusive knowledge system.

Platform Politics: The Emergence of Alternative Social Media in India

Widespread dissemination of hate speech on corporate social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube has necessitated technological companies to moderate content on their platforms. At the receiving end of these content moderation efforts are supporters of right-wing populist parties, who have gained notoriety for harassing journalists, spreading disinformation, and vilifying liberal activists. In recent months, several prominent right-wing figures across the world were removed from social media - a phenomenon also known as ‘deplatforming’- for violating platform policies. Prominent among such right-wing groups are online supporters of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India, who have begun accusing corporate social media of pursuing a ‘liberal agenda’ and ‘curtailing free speech.’ In response to deplatforming, the BJP-led Government of India has aggressively promoted and embraced Koo, an indigenously developed social media platform. This commentary examines the implications of this alternative social platform for the online communicative environment in the Indian public sphere.

Jayaprakash Narayan and Indira Gandhi, 1966–74: Before the Rivalry

When the Gandhian Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) gave the clarion call of Total Revolution, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi responded heavy-handedly by imposing the Emergency in India in 1974–5. This all-encompassing duel has dominated politics and political scholarship since. Their domestic clash has established many analytical prisms for the contemporary public sphere in India, particularly personality politics versus people’s power, single party versus coalition grouping, electoral democracy versus authoritarian dictatorship, and student/youth movements versus generational status quo. Simultaneously, it has also highlighted their differences in a way that has served to bury their affinities and agreements—not only on obscure matters. This article seeks to soften this dichotomy on the basis of their correspondence, and complemented by other primary material, to sketch their consensus in an earlier period. It shows that before their break, the socialist JP and the statist Indira Gandhi exhibited complementary stands on national issues regarding Nagaland, Kashmir and Bangladesh. This national nearness complicates their later adversarial politics on domestic issues, adds dimension to our understanding of the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, and contributes to contemporary understandings of their respective places in narratives of the state against society in India.

Masonic Ritual and the Display of Empire in 19th-Century India and Beyond

This article aims at exploring the role played by Freemasonry in displaying, promoting and celebrating the British Empire. It argues that Masonic lodges held centre stage in the Indian colonial public sphere. They organized processions, cornerstone laying ceremonies, and banquets on an unequalled scale, which all became an integral part of imperial display. Masonic ritual, therefore, held centre stage in the dramaturgy of colonial power in India, and also played a leading role in fostering the cult of Empire, which emerged in the last decades of the 19th century. In that respect, Freemasonry offers a stimulating venue for articulating the local and the global, the material and the cultural, formal and informal Empire. It also offers an interesting insight into imperial circulations.

Kiss of Love Campaign: Contesting Public Morality to Counter Collective Violence

The paper studies the immense opposition to a nonviolent campaign against the practice of moral policing in Kerala to understand the dominant spaces, collective identities, and discourses that give shape to the outrage of public morality in India. The campaign through its politics specifically targeted rightwing and political groups as well as socially embedded familial and institutional structures that exercise control over individuals through patriarchal regimes. The adverse reaction to the campaign revealed that collective aggression or violence can be used to impose majoritarian values and exert social control through the authority of public morality and everyday acts of moral policing in masculinized, politico-religious spaces that characterize the traditional public sphere in India. The contested ‘morals’ were gendered and communal notions particular to the middle classes and central to the maintenance of dominant structures of family, marriage, religious community, and the nation. The same informs notions of popular morality that give moral policing its ‘rational’ authority. The research employs online opinion pieces, reports and discussions, and two structured interviews to examine why the campaign became prominent in the public sphere. It gives coherence to the campaign’s agenda to counter the underlying violence of moral policing and suggests measures for peaceful resolution of public contestations.

Social Acceptance and Section 377: A Case Study of Transgender People in Jammu City

Abstract The Supreme Court of India recently decriminalized section 377 of the Indian Penal Code to outlaw the unfair violence and discrimination against transgender people. The paper argues that despite the legal acceptance of Section 377, the discrimination and social exclusion of transgender people continue in the Indian public sphere. The method of Interpretative Phenomenological Approach has been used to analyze the interviews of five transgender people from Jammu city. The findings suggest patterns and relationships within the data which are useful for understanding various ways in which transgender people negotiate and contemplate their lives outside the known social network they resort to. By analyzing the interpretations of selected transgender people, the study reveals that they bear the brunt of social and economic exclusion due to their gender identity on day-to-day basis.

Critique of podcasting as an anthropological method

Digital audio technologies have expanded the methodological possibilities for anthropological research. This article explores some of the implications of using podcasting as an anthropological method, specifically an experiment in which interlocutor interviews were regularly published as part of an exploration into digital politics in India. The article uses the reflexive insights garnered from making the series to interrogate the possibilities of interlocutor interview podcasting for anthropology. Further to this, it exploits the interlocutors’ expertise on digital practices to reverse the analytical gaze, asking what their experiences of the digitalising Indian public sphere can teach us about changing academic/anthropological practices, especially regarding the enabling (or not) of new ways of speaking, vocal performances, the possibility for immediate publishing, and celebrations of newness. Building from these critical appraisals, it is suggested that the latent promise of interlocutor interview podcasting lies in the potential to create ‘aural intimacy' and a ‘circulating copresence'.

Exploring Gender in South-Asian Cultural Memory Through Artistic Process

My artistic inquiries draw from gender and sexuality in public space and use performance as process. In inspiration, the works emerge as aesthetic responses to post-colonial, gendered public identities and as negotiations with the cultural politics of modernity. Dwelling on the interaction of Indian modernity with cultural memory through myth, ritual, traditions and colonial histories, I hope to touch upon multiple influences of the Indian public sphere. Through a fragmented contemplation on guiding impulses, this discussion propositions the production of works as potentials to re-eroticise the public sphere.

Exclusion and Articulation: Transgender Counter-Public in the Indian Public Sphere

The study attempts to locate transgender counter-public as an alternate public sphere in India. It argues that transgender counter-public is necessitated owing to the exclusionary practices of the Indian public sphere as well as the successive counter-public spheres. The study, further claims that transgender counter-public is constructed by critiquing the marginalisation of transgender people through exclusionary practices, and articulation of concerns linked to transgender people. Public discourse analysis of both discursive arenas—print: newspaper articles, journal articles, autobiographies, biographies, memoir, and others, and non-discursive arenas—activism, pride parade, protests and alike have been adopted as methodology. The study concludes that transgender counter-public achieves the dissemination of their concerns to the wider public that exclusion and discrimination of transgender people are a denial of social justice in the democratic social structure.

The Mughal Past and the Politics of Memorialization in Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi

The recent dominance of Hindu nationalist politics has emboldened many in India and the diaspora to call for the realization of an essentially Hindu nation-state, intensifying concerns about the future of the country’s espoused secular ideals and sizeable Muslim minority. In light of ongoing controversies surrounding the status of Mughal-era markers and monuments in the Indian public sphere, this essay argues for renewed attention to Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940), the first major English-language novel by an Indian Muslim writer, which presciently mourned the saffronization of Indian society and attendant erasure of Muslims from the national imaginary. While Twilight has often been read as an excessively maudlin text about elapsed Mughal hegemony and decaying ashraf [noble] Muslim culture, the essay argues that the novel was invested in the futurity of Delhi and India more broadly. Close examination of Ali’s portrayal of Mughal monuments and the city of Delhi reveals them to be evocative sites of composite Indian belonging, locations that are understood to be both Hindu and Muslim in character. The essay contends that Ali’s novel stands as a corrective to ongoing assertions that Muslims lack an authentic claim to the country—a poignant monumentalization of a plural India when independence was on the horizon.

Gandhi's Newspaperman: T. G. Narayanan and the quest for an independent India, 1938–46

AbstractThe expansion of the colonial public sphere in India during the 1930s and 1940s saw the nation's English-language press increasingly serve as a key site in the struggle for freedom despite British censorship. This article examines the journalistic career of T. G. Narayanan, the first Indian war correspondent and investigative reporter, to understand the role of English-language newspapers in India's quest for independence. Narayanan reported on two major events leading to independence: the Bengal famine of 1943 and the Second World War. Drawing on Michael Walzer's concept of the ‘connected critic’, this research demonstrates that Narayanan's journalism fuelled the Indian nationalist movement by manoeuvring around British censors to publicize and expand Mahatma Gandhi's criticism of British rule, especially in light of the famine and war. His one departure from the pacifist leader, however, was his support of Indian soldiers serving in the Indian National Army and British Army.