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| 1 |
ID:
182415
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| Summary/Abstract |
Public histories are narratives straddling across space and time, challenging the inside/outside distinction. Indian foreign policy makers have engaged in a selective remembering of the past in an attempt to script the making of a postcolonial state. The study takes up three cases from India’s foreign policy in elucidating how different imaginations of India’s identity has been refashioned to legitimize its foreign policy. These three cases point to Nehru’s decision to join the Commonwealth, Vajpayee’s strides for nuclearization and Modi’s approach toward the diaspora. We argue that foreign policy makers in India have either refrained from engaging with ‘public history’ due to their uncritical positioning in structural realism or erected versions of the past that happily rationalize their contemporary practices. The deployment of public histories has taken place to invoke India rightful place in the international order and as instruments in shaping public consensus which advances the interests of the elites in validating their foreign policy choices. This elite-driven exercise is shot through the dominant Western imaginations and cognitive categories although these elites self- consciously took charge of the destiny of a nation that had to be refashioned as ‘post- colonial.’
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| 2 |
ID:
182411
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Postcolonialism has proven to be a fertile ground for interdisciplinary enquiries into the loci of power and agents of change. It has provoked intellectuals to ask probing questions about the exclusions, disparities and invisibilities they detect as pervading international politics, both elite and everyday. This sensibility has informed analyses that examined imperial associations with globalization,1 identity,2 memory,3 development,4 and indeed, with the international itself,5 among other issues.
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| 3 |
ID:
182414
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| Summary/Abstract |
Postage stamps are a significant visual text of an issuing state. In 1947, British India was divided into independent states of India and Pakistan. The successive new regimes in both countries got the freedom to design, print, and circulate the official visual iconography through postage stamps as a symbol of sovereignty for its citizens and the world community. This article explores how India and Pakistan visualized the narrative of national identity and discourse on development through postage stamps in the first two decades of their independence. The article does not intend to retell the narrative of the postcolonial nation-building process in the subcontinent. Instead, the objective is to introduce postage stamps as a primary visual resource for exploring the contours of public history of India and Pakistan by arguing that stamps retain its importance as excellent visual archives for postcolonial scholarly analysis in the age of new media.
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| 4 |
ID:
182413
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| Summary/Abstract |
The “cultural turn” in memory studies acknowledges that collective memory has a distinctive social aspect reflected in the manner in which it is communicated orally from one individual or generation to another. However, the point of departure is the emphasis on the need to account for the fact that memory is, in equal measure, shaped and mediated by tangible channels such as texts, images, objects, rituals, buildings and so on. The interactions and intersections between these two strands of approaching collective memory have been employed to write the most human and engaging histories of trauma and displacement – especially in the context of the Holocaust. This article takes this discussion forward by critically looking at the scope of the field of memory studies – with its largely Western frames of reference – to facilitate a deeper understanding of similar engagements and entanglements between communicative and culturally tangible forms of collective memory in South Asia. It looks at the ways in which the dominant discourse of nationalism is constructed and contested through the politics inherent in memorialization and memory in the South Asian context by comparing the partition of 1947 that resulted in the creation of Pakistan and the Liberation War of 1971 which gave birth to Bangladesh. Through a review of some important recent works of scholarship on the long, complex and intertwined afterlife of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, this article shows how the processes of the construction and contestation of a dominant discourse of nationalism and nationhood are fraught with their own forms of remembrance and forgetting. And yet they speak in a language of exceptionalism that mirrors a somewhat universal template for remembering “difficult pasts” characteristic of the memorial landscape of the Holocaust. Finally, it is argued that the interstices of “national memory” contain voices that unsettle or counter it. Acknowledging these voices while also recognizing their own memory politics shall broaden and nuance the dominant modes of memorializing the partition and the Liberation War in a way that better reflects the specificities and complexities of their context.
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| 5 |
ID:
182416
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| Summary/Abstract |
In 2005 Rev. Michael Roden, the vicar at Church of England church of St Mary’s in Hitchin (a small town about 30 miles north of London) was invited to India to give a series of sermons to Indian Church of England congregations. He was struck during his visit by the scars in Indian society that he thought were the remnants of Partition’s aftermath. His visit set him thinking about the ways in which Partition has shaped British as well as Indian and Pakistani society, and about how little people in the UK know about the calamitous results of British policy at the time of decolonization. In particular, he wondered about why it was the case that Partition had never been taught in schools in the UK, and why children were coming out of school with no understanding of the forces which had created a multi-cultural society in the UK over the course of the twentieth century. Reverend Roden contacted the University of Cambridge’s Centre of South Asian Studies and set in train a series of events that would lead to Partition being included in the curriculum of all Church of England schools in England and Wales. This process was to engage politicians, academics, playwrights, television companies and members of the general public. It would lead to more than teaching in the classroom – a swathe of television documentaries, for example, were broadcast around he 70th anniversary of Partition in 2017, providing information about a part of the shared UK/South Asian past which has been largely neglected in Britain. Alongside this process, the Centre of South Asian Studies also prepared an exhibition of materials from its own archive collections which ran from August 2017 and drew in thousands of visitors. This paper will examine the ways in which the process of presenting Partition to the people of the UK was fashioned and followed, and the nature of the output which resulted from it, looking at the ways in which academe can interact with public opinion and public knowledge in meaningful and positive ways.
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| 6 |
ID:
182412
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| Summary/Abstract |
The article looks at British India’s Burma campaign of 1941–45 and asks why the decisive battles of Imphal and Kohima appear to be virtually invisible from India’s national imagination today. It further critiques dominant readings of the twin battles for their failure to accommodate the heterogeneity of experiences and contributions of the hill tribes of the India-Burma borderlands who fought in it. The omission appears even more intriguing given that despite being on the winning side, the border communities end up losing the memory battle. While it questions the conventional notion that memory is the postcolonial state’s prerogative, it also recognizes that counter-memories are by no means monolithic. It makes the case for acknowledging alternative constructions and communities of practice that imaginatively decenter the construction of memory in the borderlands. Without connecting with the lives, and in turn, the memories of the border communities who inhabit the physical sites of the war, the cliché of the “forgotten war” will remain an overused, and ultimately, an offensive trope.
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