As societies have become culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse, the politics of identity has assumed greater importance as well has taken new forms. Given the diverse manifestations of identity politics in today’s time, this particular constellation aims to draw insights from different disciplines like history, sociology, political science, philosophy, and economics to explore and understand the ever-evolving field of politics, its impact on issues vital to society and their roots in historical processes. Adopting a critical social inquiry approach, the constellation research will combine empirical research, theoretical reflection, and archival work to problematise ideas and raise questions pertaining to the political.
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Associate Professor, JGLS
Associate Professor, JGLS
Associate Professor, JSLH
In the run-up to the 2024 elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has made conscious political outreach to Pasmanda Muslims, who constitute 85 percent of the Muslim population in India. With an eye on backward Muslims, the BJP planned a sneh (affection) and samman (respect) yatra in the year 2023 highlighting the plight of Pasmanda Muslims and Muslim women. However, these overtures belie the everyday violence that underpins the demonisation of Muslims by the majoritarian government, with the majority of victims belonging to the Pasmanda community, whether lynching, demolition of properties, or incarceration.
Highlighting the issue of disproportionate violence inflicted on Pasmanda Muslims, the All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz report Bihar Caste Survey 2022-2023 and Pasmanda Agenda stated, “Ninety-five per cent of the victims of mob lynching and excesses by government bulldozers belong to the Pasmanda community.” This contradiction complicates the categories of caste and religion in the (Indian) Muslim context. This study aims to explore the interplay of caste and religion in the backdrop of Hindu majoritarian politics that produces Muslims as a homogenous category while at the same time projects itself as the messiah of the backward Muslims in its politics of exclusion and (mis)representation.
Through ethnographic fieldwork in the Muslim-dominated Rampur district of Uttar Pradesh, where BJP won in civic polls, this study will investigate how Pasmanda Muslims reconcile with BJP’s duplicitous politics that promises to empower them on the one hand and systematically targets them on the other.
Ambreen Agha, Swapnil Dhanraj
Chhath is traditionally a festival of the masses, celebrated mainly in Bihar, Jharkhand, and eastern Uttar Pradesh. A marker of socio-cultural identity, this festival is an expression of indigeneity that resists any attempts at homogenization of identity, rituals, and tradition. However, over the years, Chhath has moved out of its geographical confines into urban cities due to rapid migration. In these urban spaces, the celebrations of Chhath have led to its mainstreaming alongside other popular festivals like the Durga Puja.
Primarily a subaltern festival that prevent(ed) appropriation by the social elites [Sinha, 2023], today Chhath is marked by a “reverse trend” with its entry into metropolitan cities wherein the elites have adopted the subaltern culture. Given this change in the social aspect of Chhath, this study aims to explore the continuities and changes that exist in the performance of the rituals in this four-day festival across urban and non-urban social settings.
Does ritual performance enthrone hegemonic Brahmanical practices with the ‘priest’ as the center of activity, or does it dismantle Brahmanical performativity? It has been observed that Chhath celebrations blur the social boundaries across religious, caste, and gender lines in its traditional non-urban spaces. How are these social boundaries navigated in urban spaces? Does the celebration of Chhath in metropolitan cities continue to blur social boundaries or rigidify them?
Taking a multi-site ethnographic approach and Chhath as the subject of study, this paper advances the argument that there is a link between human migration and the mutation of socio-religious traditions.
Ambreen Agha & Kaushalya Bajpayee
In recent years, the role that emotions play in public life has taken center stage in debates and discussions around the rise of populist leaders across the world. These debates have delved into the productivity and counter-productivity of anger as well as relating it to ‘dialogical politics’.
In the philosophical traditions, anger has been relegated from the political sphere, which is primarily identified with “reason.” This dichotomy of reason and emotion is further problematized with the rise of right-wing populist parties that employ emotions and feelings of fear, anxiety, powerlessness, and anger in their political rhetoric. For anger to be channelized, political parties create an internal or external “enemy.”
However, anger is not monolithic. Understood as a political emotion, anger is a heterogeneous expression—an ongoing dialectical process that is both individual and collective, historical and social. This paper aims to conceptualize anger both as an expression of resentment that is mobilized by populist parties and an expression of resistance from below that challenges the dominant political narrative and hegemonic ideologies.
In doing this, the paper will explore the manipulation and mobilization of resentment into collective political anger by conservative parties and the existence of resistance movements to the exclusionary politics that comes with the resurgence of conservative politics, globally.
Ambreen Agha & Aejaz Ahmad Wani
This study seeks to reconstruct the early history of India’s oldest tribal autonomy movement - the demand for a separate state of Jharkhand under the leadership of Jaipal Singh Munda. In the 1930s, several tribal groups reinvented themselves as ‘Adibasis’ (the original inhabitants of India) and coalesced under the banner of the 'Adibasi Mahasabha'. The creation of this united front was a form of political assertion whose significance remains hitherto unexamined.
Contextualizing the first phase of the Jharkhand movement helps map the transformation of the administrative category of ‘Backward Tribes’ into the political category of ‘Adibasi’. While the former emphasized the governmental rationality of educational and political ‘backwardness’, the latter transcended the administrative logic of segregating individual tribes to create a self-consciously modern Adivasi selfhood. Through this transformation, Jaipal Singh Munda claimed the status of a ‘Primitive Nationalist’.
Although Jharkhand as an administrative province became a reality only in 2000, the idea struck roots in the 1930s. Over the next two decades, the territorial imagination of an autonomous tribal homeland became the harbinger of modern associational politics for tribal groups. A highly disparate set of communities rallied behind this new identity and ultimately coalesced to form a ‘Coalition Aborigines’, better known as the ‘Adibasi Mahasabha’. At its vanguard stood Jaipal Singh Munda, an ex-sports superstar who had captained the Indian Hockey Team towards its first-ever Olympics gold medal (Amsterdam Games, 1928). Under his innovative leadership, intensive mobilization campaigns were conducted by a dedicated cadre across eastern India demanding the separation of the Chotanagpur Division and the Santhal Parganas from the state of Bihar. As the movement grew, its ramifications were felt beyond British India as Munda sought a Greater Jharkhand which included the territories of many princely states. Thus, the movement came to play a catalytic role in the integration of many forest polities into the Union of India.
The Adibasi Mahasabha was a notable experiment in forging a ‘united front’ of various tribal political associations and provided a dynamic platform to an entirely new breed of political activists. The movement heralded a new age of electoral politics within the Chotanagpur tribes who consciously began identifying themselves as Adibasis and paved the way for the emergence of Jaipal Singh Munda as their Marang Gomke (Supreme Leader). While most discussions on Munda treat him in either hagiographic or iconoclastic terms, my analysis situates his meteoric rise in the context of the popular movement for regional autonomy. An overview of his career shows that Munda sought to become the ‘Sole Spokesman’ for Indian tribes but his ambition was checkmated by the Congress Party which stonewalled the demand for Jharkhand. This book will uncover the rough and tumble of Adivasi politics and its often tumultuous relationship with the Congress nationalists from Bihar.
Project by Saagar Tewari
Feminist theory, within its varied frameworks, has been dealing with motherhood as a concept of inquiry. Feminist scholars like Adrienne Rich, Andrea O’Reilly, Shulamith Firestone, Carole Pateman, and Sara Ruddick, among many others, saw motherhood as a key site of oppression of women in a patriarchal structure of power relations in society. The American family researcher Margaret Movius argued that “the childfree alternative” should be viewed as “women’s ultimate liberation.”
Studies adopting a qualitative approach to voluntary childlessness have identified a wide range of motivating factors for women, such as lack of “maternal instinct”; dislike of, or disinterest in, children; fear of painful childbirth; humanitarian concerns about population growth; career orientation; and a more satisfactory marriage. The feeling of freedom runs in the arguments for remaining childless. Research on voluntary childlessness demonstrates how childfree women are stereotyped as selfish, abnormal, immature, bitter, and child-haters.
Patriarchal societies promulgate the dogma of motherhood, which confines women’s mobility and ensures that they are compliant in delivering their duties to breed and rear children. However, what is important to note here is that these discourses completely ignore the reproductive rights and health of the women who are the center of such discussions.
In this proposed research, we aim to adopt a reproductive justice approach to look critically at childlessness and motherhood and juxtapose these concepts with women’s sexual and reproductive rights and health. Such an analysis will help uncover the subjective meanings of women’s autonomy over their own bodies and choices as against the compulsory mothering role assigned to them by society. The current research aims to examine the intimate politics of reproduction in India as a category of analysis to further comprehend the significance of reproductive justice in these political dynamics.
Kaushalya Bajpayee & Dalia Bhattacharjee