This article combines historical and life-writing approaches to demonstrate how caste is made inv... more This article combines historical and life-writing approaches to demonstrate how caste is made invisible in histories and structures of education, canonical knowledge, and research. As a dominant-caste (savarna) Bengali academic, the author follows caste-oppressed feminists to offer a methodological intervention that challenges several ways in which castelessness is reproduced in feminist scholarship. The author asks why savarna write castelessly. “Writing castelessly,” wherein caste reflexivity is absented from analysis, solidarity, and teaching, is one manifestation of savarna feminists’ historical-material relation to caste. Narrating regional caste histories of savarna Bengalis, the author shows that her practice of writing castelessly is founded on material structures of power—historically claimed monopolies over culture and education, land, labor, and political representation. Relatedly, another reason savarna write castelessly is that disciplinary training in social sciences i...
Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning
Grounded in a friendship that began in the academy, we write together to problematize collaborati... more Grounded in a friendship that began in the academy, we write together to problematize collaborative writing across our distinct caste positionalities. Writing as caste-oppressed Pakistani Muslim settler (Patel) and dominant caste Indian settler (Da Costa), we write primarily across caste power lines to focus on the failure in our own efforts at collaborative writing. This article, initially meant to focus on our complicities in white settler colonialism in its present form, reflects on the detours we undertook to arrive at this place of certainty that “we cannot write about our complicity together.” Specifically, we reconsider some assumptions underlining prominent methodological commitments of transnational collaborative writing across uneven locations in, for, and beyond the academy. Collaborative writing has been championed for its capacity to generate dialogue across disagreements, praxis grounded in social change, a challenge to the academy’s notions of individual knowledge-pro...
This paper uses a multiple colonialisms approach to study cultural production in India and argue ... more This paper uses a multiple colonialisms approach to study cultural production in India and argue that coloniality is not a casteless structure of violence. In discursive and planning rhetoric, 'creativity is in India's DNA.' This discourse incites the poor to harness and develop their tangible and intangible cultural heritage in order to feed themselves. Foregrounding anti-caste, Dalit scholarship in conversation with extant formulations of decolonial aesthetics focuses urgent attention on the fact that caste domination and violence structure interstate political systems of development planning and post/ colonial state discourses of heritage that claim to feed the caste-oppressed poor with their own creativity. This article attends to the political histories and critiques of Indigenous Chhara performance artists because their expressive cultures foreground anti-caste struggles against simultaneous state erasure and capture of Indigenous creativity. Against planning's compensatory solution of eating heritage, anti-caste scholarship and the creative politics of Budhan Theatre refute the apparent castelessness of what counts as creativity and heritage, demonstrating that optimistic global creative economy discourses actually rely upon caste and colonial histories to entrench castebased definitions of heritage within international and national development regimes. Budhan Theatre's decolonizing cultural production avoids the mistakes of postcolonial scholarship and its erasure of caste histories. They prompt a multiple colonialisms approach which refuses labels of postcolonial or settler colonial states to privilege instead attention to the actually existing contemporary ways in which caste violence structures interstate systems of violence, policies, and discourses.
Although Jana Natya Manch’s working-class theater poses an ideological challenge to hegemonic cre... more Although Jana Natya Manch’s working-class theater poses an ideological challenge to hegemonic creativity for neoliberal capitalism and Hindu nationalism, this chapter analyzes the historical, affective and political incitements and messy collaborations between ideological opposites. This middle-class troupe’s plays dedicated to working-class struggles confront the challenge and decimation of labor struggle through a life-long commitment to Marxian critique. Far from an ahistorical commitment, their ‘ideology for life’ responds to contemporary challenges, in part by memorializing the personal, subjective, and spatial deaths of ideal leaders and sites of worker struggle. Memorialization and nostalgia largely distances them from working-class lives, but it makes their politics and performance effective sites for contemporary constructions of progressive middle-classness in Delhi whilst generating an inadvertent embrace of creative economies discourse.
In this chapter, the global creative economy discursive regime is shown to be a spatially-differe... more In this chapter, the global creative economy discursive regime is shown to be a spatially-differentiated and power-laden practice. Analyzing the ways in which heritage, creative economy and urban development have become inseparable concerns in India, Delhi and Ahmedabad, it shows that creative economy discourse relies upon and reinforces entrenched colonial capitalist structures of production and rule. Locating the emergence of hope and optimism, the chapter argues that creative economy practices replace, rebrand, and profit from rebranding older modes of governance and their ordinary violence located in class, caste, gender and religious relations. In so doing, creative economy practices aestheticize the profound and normal contradictions of contemporary capitalist development and democracy in India.
This chapter continues to complicate the optimistic embrace of creative livelihoods and practices... more This chapter continues to complicate the optimistic embrace of creative livelihoods and practices as a mode of transitioning away from criminality by attending to Budhan Theater’s gender politics and performance. Competing constructions of good work and good women rest on complex intersections and negotiations of histories of stigma based on criminality alongside histories of stigma attached to women performing onstage. The chapter argues that performance enables uneven class mobility and intense affective experiences of cross-dressing men. Ultimately although Budhan Theater leaders optimistically promote artistic practice and creative livelihoods their plays are also a tribute to the economic value, embodied strength, and moral meaning of illegal livelihoods of Chhara women offstage. Ultimately, this shows that Budhan Theater’s embrace of creative economy is hardly absolute.
This chapter historically locates the creative economy global discursive regime in the Indian con... more This chapter historically locates the creative economy global discursive regime in the Indian context whilst challenging the presumed newness of creative economy policy. Tracing Indian policy debates over culture and development since the 1950s, it demystifies the seeming contradictions between disjuncture and continuity in policy by considering the sentiments deployed in India’s planning process. India’s political economic transition from development nationalism to neoliberal capitalism is accompanied by a shift from sentimental nationalism and its pity for artisanal victims of planned industrialization in the 1950s toward sentimental capitalism and its optimism about the poor’s artistic entrepreneurialism in the new millennium. Hindu culturalisms and neoliberal commodification combine to sell pride and optimism as means of reinventing Indian heritage—lending a global discourse traction.
This chapter examines Janam’s plays on religious violence to ask how Jana Natya Manch responds to... more This chapter examines Janam’s plays on religious violence to ask how Jana Natya Manch responds to the Hindu Right’s powerful constructions of religiosity as a site of genocidal violence in Delhi and Ahmedabad as well as the more ‘soft’ religious footprint of heritage projects. It argues that the troupe’s ideology for life produces a disparaging account of religion as political ideology most sharply expressed in their humorous critiques. Laughter diminishes the total efficacy of fascist violence over social life and possibility. However, the chapter argues, laughter is also an inadequate and even counterproductive response to popular genocide and corporatized religiosity. Ultimately, laughter consoles progressive political forces in the face of fascist violence whilst alienating those for whom religiosity is an everyday mode of belonging.
This chapter asks whether another creative economy is possible—one that negotiates and goes beyon... more This chapter asks whether another creative economy is possible—one that negotiates and goes beyond the terms of hegemonic neoliberal and Hindu constructions of creative economy. It argues that Budhan Theater provides a glimpse of such a creative economy born in the crucible of ongoing betrayals in their pursuit of rehabilitation from criminalized histories. They find ways of making their creative practices overcome the deadly inseparability of the ways in which the police and governmental patronage of Chhara survival continues to patronize Chhara stigma. Budhan Theater this chapter argues, finds a line of flight that refuses the divisive sectarianism and the violent, hegemonic patronage systems within which the conditions of survival for the urban poor and the politics among the oppressed has become contained in India.
Budhan Theater’s community-based politics and performance seems perfectly aligned with creative e... more Budhan Theater’s community-based politics and performance seems perfectly aligned with creative economy discourses, given the optimism with which the indigenous Chhara community embraces the possibility of transcending stigmatized histories of criminality through creative practices and livelihood opportunities. Yet, this chapter complicates this optimism by highlighting the complex affective structures—betrayal, sentimental optimism, cruel pessimism, and ordinary regard—that coconstitute Chhara history of criminality and activist performance. Combining transnational feminism, queer and affect theory, it challenges Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism and argues that cruel pessimism better describes the affective structure of those compelled to pursue the (bad) good life even while living with colonial capitalism’s ongoing betrayals. Like the Chhara, such putative citizens are compelled to embrace citizenship through their pessimistic critique of its resounding failures.
This chapter deploys Diana Taylor’s terms of archive and repertoire to study Jana Natya Manch’s g... more This chapter deploys Diana Taylor’s terms of archive and repertoire to study Jana Natya Manch’s gender plays situating them in the debate between Indian socialism and feminism since the 1970s. Considering the troupe’s gender analysis as it coconstitutes their ideology for life, it demonstrates the troupe’s contributions to enriching the trade union movement, whilst mourning their neglect of informal, domestic labor, sexwork and caste intersectionalities. Janam’s archive of gender plays reflects the certainties of their ideology, whereas their repertoire unsettles, renders vulnerable, and opens up this ideology to the powerful potential of the unanticipated and messy in experiences of gender violence, activism, knowledge and labor. Archive and repertoire constitute two dimensions of the hunger called theatre—willful transgression and emotional intensities that nonetheless signify revolt.
India is reported to have the most dynamic micro-insurance market in the world and the largest we... more India is reported to have the most dynamic micro-insurance market in the world and the largest weather-index insurance market among developing countries. This is interesting because, paradoxically, reports readily suggest that the primary hindrance for the industry is the widespread lack of effective demand for insurance. This paper seeks to identify, understand and problematize the paradox of resolutely promoting microinsurance and its apparent rapid growth despite a manifest absence of demand for insurance. Neo-classical theories about risk-averse behaviour do not explain the current lack of appeal of insurance among the poor. Rather, I draw on a postcolonial political economy framework to argue that expert investment in getting prices and culture right while safeguarding micro-insurance supply currently explains the celebrated dynamism of Indian micro-insurance. I argue that promoting comprehensive institutional reform for an ideal investment and entrepreneurial climate involves securing mutually beneficial linkages, collaborations and knowledge within a broad assemblage of profit motives, insurance expertise, policy-makers and professionals. Insurance experts rule by promoting the micro-insurance sector while simultaneously investing in and gaining from discursive, material and pedagogical construction of this industry. Future research should address whether such processes and products are effective in managing financial risks of the poor.
In this introduction to the special journal issue, we elaborate a multiple colonialisms framework... more In this introduction to the special journal issue, we elaborate a multiple colonialisms framework that allows us to examine the complex relationalities of multiple and converging colonial relations in historical and contemporary contexts within which cultural production does its work. Through examples of cultural production from the Americas and Asia, Special Issue contributors analyse rarely-recognized sites of colonialism that bear a palimpsestic relationship to other articulations that are more commonly legible as colonialism. Such an approach makes new analytical connections and gives greater depth to conventional theorizations of coloniality and decolonization. We also illustrate the centrality of the scholarship of Indigenous, Black, and Dalit-Bahujan scholars to the framework, especially the ways in which their work challenges our collective and accumulated racialized and colonial unknowings and illuminates what often remains unthinkable in conventional analyses of cultural production and the colonial contexts of their making. Overall, rather than analytically imply pluralism and equivalence among varied colonialisms, we argue that a multiple colonialisms framework enables cultural studies scholarship to dwell on the relationality, contradictions, and incommensurabilities generated within converging structures and multiple articulations of colonial and racialized violence across spaces. Weaving the various contributions into the framework, we invite readers to consider what histories, structures, and relationships help to explain why actually existing colonialities remain illegible as such in the particular context of each paper, and what that implies for solidarity and decolonization struggles. We hope that highlighting the specific creative methodological practices and significant spatial and temporal rethinking that a multiple colonialisms approach can generate incites conversations about how we might enrich theorizations of coloniality and decolonization.
This article combines historical and life-writing approaches to demonstrate how caste is made inv... more This article combines historical and life-writing approaches to demonstrate how caste is made invisible in histories and structures of education, canonical knowledge, and research. As a dominant-caste (savarna) Bengali academic, the author follows caste-oppressed feminists to offer a methodological intervention that challenges several ways in which castelessness is reproduced in feminist scholarship. The author asks why savarna write castelessly. “Writing castelessly,” wherein caste reflexivity is absented from analysis, solidarity, and teaching, is one manifestation of savarna feminists’ historical-material relation to caste. Narrating regional caste histories of savarna Bengalis, the author shows that her practice of writing castelessly is founded on material structures of power—historically claimed monopolies over culture and education, land, labor, and political representation. Relatedly, another reason savarna write castelessly is that disciplinary training in social sciences i...
Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning
Grounded in a friendship that began in the academy, we write together to problematize collaborati... more Grounded in a friendship that began in the academy, we write together to problematize collaborative writing across our distinct caste positionalities. Writing as caste-oppressed Pakistani Muslim settler (Patel) and dominant caste Indian settler (Da Costa), we write primarily across caste power lines to focus on the failure in our own efforts at collaborative writing. This article, initially meant to focus on our complicities in white settler colonialism in its present form, reflects on the detours we undertook to arrive at this place of certainty that “we cannot write about our complicity together.” Specifically, we reconsider some assumptions underlining prominent methodological commitments of transnational collaborative writing across uneven locations in, for, and beyond the academy. Collaborative writing has been championed for its capacity to generate dialogue across disagreements, praxis grounded in social change, a challenge to the academy’s notions of individual knowledge-pro...
This paper uses a multiple colonialisms approach to study cultural production in India and argue ... more This paper uses a multiple colonialisms approach to study cultural production in India and argue that coloniality is not a casteless structure of violence. In discursive and planning rhetoric, 'creativity is in India's DNA.' This discourse incites the poor to harness and develop their tangible and intangible cultural heritage in order to feed themselves. Foregrounding anti-caste, Dalit scholarship in conversation with extant formulations of decolonial aesthetics focuses urgent attention on the fact that caste domination and violence structure interstate political systems of development planning and post/ colonial state discourses of heritage that claim to feed the caste-oppressed poor with their own creativity. This article attends to the political histories and critiques of Indigenous Chhara performance artists because their expressive cultures foreground anti-caste struggles against simultaneous state erasure and capture of Indigenous creativity. Against planning's compensatory solution of eating heritage, anti-caste scholarship and the creative politics of Budhan Theatre refute the apparent castelessness of what counts as creativity and heritage, demonstrating that optimistic global creative economy discourses actually rely upon caste and colonial histories to entrench castebased definitions of heritage within international and national development regimes. Budhan Theatre's decolonizing cultural production avoids the mistakes of postcolonial scholarship and its erasure of caste histories. They prompt a multiple colonialisms approach which refuses labels of postcolonial or settler colonial states to privilege instead attention to the actually existing contemporary ways in which caste violence structures interstate systems of violence, policies, and discourses.
Although Jana Natya Manch’s working-class theater poses an ideological challenge to hegemonic cre... more Although Jana Natya Manch’s working-class theater poses an ideological challenge to hegemonic creativity for neoliberal capitalism and Hindu nationalism, this chapter analyzes the historical, affective and political incitements and messy collaborations between ideological opposites. This middle-class troupe’s plays dedicated to working-class struggles confront the challenge and decimation of labor struggle through a life-long commitment to Marxian critique. Far from an ahistorical commitment, their ‘ideology for life’ responds to contemporary challenges, in part by memorializing the personal, subjective, and spatial deaths of ideal leaders and sites of worker struggle. Memorialization and nostalgia largely distances them from working-class lives, but it makes their politics and performance effective sites for contemporary constructions of progressive middle-classness in Delhi whilst generating an inadvertent embrace of creative economies discourse.
In this chapter, the global creative economy discursive regime is shown to be a spatially-differe... more In this chapter, the global creative economy discursive regime is shown to be a spatially-differentiated and power-laden practice. Analyzing the ways in which heritage, creative economy and urban development have become inseparable concerns in India, Delhi and Ahmedabad, it shows that creative economy discourse relies upon and reinforces entrenched colonial capitalist structures of production and rule. Locating the emergence of hope and optimism, the chapter argues that creative economy practices replace, rebrand, and profit from rebranding older modes of governance and their ordinary violence located in class, caste, gender and religious relations. In so doing, creative economy practices aestheticize the profound and normal contradictions of contemporary capitalist development and democracy in India.
This chapter continues to complicate the optimistic embrace of creative livelihoods and practices... more This chapter continues to complicate the optimistic embrace of creative livelihoods and practices as a mode of transitioning away from criminality by attending to Budhan Theater’s gender politics and performance. Competing constructions of good work and good women rest on complex intersections and negotiations of histories of stigma based on criminality alongside histories of stigma attached to women performing onstage. The chapter argues that performance enables uneven class mobility and intense affective experiences of cross-dressing men. Ultimately although Budhan Theater leaders optimistically promote artistic practice and creative livelihoods their plays are also a tribute to the economic value, embodied strength, and moral meaning of illegal livelihoods of Chhara women offstage. Ultimately, this shows that Budhan Theater’s embrace of creative economy is hardly absolute.
This chapter historically locates the creative economy global discursive regime in the Indian con... more This chapter historically locates the creative economy global discursive regime in the Indian context whilst challenging the presumed newness of creative economy policy. Tracing Indian policy debates over culture and development since the 1950s, it demystifies the seeming contradictions between disjuncture and continuity in policy by considering the sentiments deployed in India’s planning process. India’s political economic transition from development nationalism to neoliberal capitalism is accompanied by a shift from sentimental nationalism and its pity for artisanal victims of planned industrialization in the 1950s toward sentimental capitalism and its optimism about the poor’s artistic entrepreneurialism in the new millennium. Hindu culturalisms and neoliberal commodification combine to sell pride and optimism as means of reinventing Indian heritage—lending a global discourse traction.
This chapter examines Janam’s plays on religious violence to ask how Jana Natya Manch responds to... more This chapter examines Janam’s plays on religious violence to ask how Jana Natya Manch responds to the Hindu Right’s powerful constructions of religiosity as a site of genocidal violence in Delhi and Ahmedabad as well as the more ‘soft’ religious footprint of heritage projects. It argues that the troupe’s ideology for life produces a disparaging account of religion as political ideology most sharply expressed in their humorous critiques. Laughter diminishes the total efficacy of fascist violence over social life and possibility. However, the chapter argues, laughter is also an inadequate and even counterproductive response to popular genocide and corporatized religiosity. Ultimately, laughter consoles progressive political forces in the face of fascist violence whilst alienating those for whom religiosity is an everyday mode of belonging.
This chapter asks whether another creative economy is possible—one that negotiates and goes beyon... more This chapter asks whether another creative economy is possible—one that negotiates and goes beyond the terms of hegemonic neoliberal and Hindu constructions of creative economy. It argues that Budhan Theater provides a glimpse of such a creative economy born in the crucible of ongoing betrayals in their pursuit of rehabilitation from criminalized histories. They find ways of making their creative practices overcome the deadly inseparability of the ways in which the police and governmental patronage of Chhara survival continues to patronize Chhara stigma. Budhan Theater this chapter argues, finds a line of flight that refuses the divisive sectarianism and the violent, hegemonic patronage systems within which the conditions of survival for the urban poor and the politics among the oppressed has become contained in India.
Budhan Theater’s community-based politics and performance seems perfectly aligned with creative e... more Budhan Theater’s community-based politics and performance seems perfectly aligned with creative economy discourses, given the optimism with which the indigenous Chhara community embraces the possibility of transcending stigmatized histories of criminality through creative practices and livelihood opportunities. Yet, this chapter complicates this optimism by highlighting the complex affective structures—betrayal, sentimental optimism, cruel pessimism, and ordinary regard—that coconstitute Chhara history of criminality and activist performance. Combining transnational feminism, queer and affect theory, it challenges Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism and argues that cruel pessimism better describes the affective structure of those compelled to pursue the (bad) good life even while living with colonial capitalism’s ongoing betrayals. Like the Chhara, such putative citizens are compelled to embrace citizenship through their pessimistic critique of its resounding failures.
This chapter deploys Diana Taylor’s terms of archive and repertoire to study Jana Natya Manch’s g... more This chapter deploys Diana Taylor’s terms of archive and repertoire to study Jana Natya Manch’s gender plays situating them in the debate between Indian socialism and feminism since the 1970s. Considering the troupe’s gender analysis as it coconstitutes their ideology for life, it demonstrates the troupe’s contributions to enriching the trade union movement, whilst mourning their neglect of informal, domestic labor, sexwork and caste intersectionalities. Janam’s archive of gender plays reflects the certainties of their ideology, whereas their repertoire unsettles, renders vulnerable, and opens up this ideology to the powerful potential of the unanticipated and messy in experiences of gender violence, activism, knowledge and labor. Archive and repertoire constitute two dimensions of the hunger called theatre—willful transgression and emotional intensities that nonetheless signify revolt.
India is reported to have the most dynamic micro-insurance market in the world and the largest we... more India is reported to have the most dynamic micro-insurance market in the world and the largest weather-index insurance market among developing countries. This is interesting because, paradoxically, reports readily suggest that the primary hindrance for the industry is the widespread lack of effective demand for insurance. This paper seeks to identify, understand and problematize the paradox of resolutely promoting microinsurance and its apparent rapid growth despite a manifest absence of demand for insurance. Neo-classical theories about risk-averse behaviour do not explain the current lack of appeal of insurance among the poor. Rather, I draw on a postcolonial political economy framework to argue that expert investment in getting prices and culture right while safeguarding micro-insurance supply currently explains the celebrated dynamism of Indian micro-insurance. I argue that promoting comprehensive institutional reform for an ideal investment and entrepreneurial climate involves securing mutually beneficial linkages, collaborations and knowledge within a broad assemblage of profit motives, insurance expertise, policy-makers and professionals. Insurance experts rule by promoting the micro-insurance sector while simultaneously investing in and gaining from discursive, material and pedagogical construction of this industry. Future research should address whether such processes and products are effective in managing financial risks of the poor.
In this introduction to the special journal issue, we elaborate a multiple colonialisms framework... more In this introduction to the special journal issue, we elaborate a multiple colonialisms framework that allows us to examine the complex relationalities of multiple and converging colonial relations in historical and contemporary contexts within which cultural production does its work. Through examples of cultural production from the Americas and Asia, Special Issue contributors analyse rarely-recognized sites of colonialism that bear a palimpsestic relationship to other articulations that are more commonly legible as colonialism. Such an approach makes new analytical connections and gives greater depth to conventional theorizations of coloniality and decolonization. We also illustrate the centrality of the scholarship of Indigenous, Black, and Dalit-Bahujan scholars to the framework, especially the ways in which their work challenges our collective and accumulated racialized and colonial unknowings and illuminates what often remains unthinkable in conventional analyses of cultural production and the colonial contexts of their making. Overall, rather than analytically imply pluralism and equivalence among varied colonialisms, we argue that a multiple colonialisms framework enables cultural studies scholarship to dwell on the relationality, contradictions, and incommensurabilities generated within converging structures and multiple articulations of colonial and racialized violence across spaces. Weaving the various contributions into the framework, we invite readers to consider what histories, structures, and relationships help to explain why actually existing colonialities remain illegible as such in the particular context of each paper, and what that implies for solidarity and decolonization struggles. We hope that highlighting the specific creative methodological practices and significant spatial and temporal rethinking that a multiple colonialisms approach can generate incites conversations about how we might enrich theorizations of coloniality and decolonization.
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Papers by Dia Da Costa