Papers by Prathama Banerjee
Elementary Aspects of the Political
Duke University Press eBooks, 2020
Culture/politics: The curious double-bind of the Indian adivasi
given me perspective. Lata-di and Naga gave given unconditional affection and hope. Debu-da, perh... more given me perspective. Lata-di and Naga gave given unconditional affection and hope. Debu-da, perhaps my oldest and best friend, Aiay-da and Julte-da, who supplied me with many Bengali texts and provoked me with their extraordinary thoughts and lifestyles, and others have always welcomed me back from my detours. Without Mala-di, I would never have had the luxury of undisturbed days of study-Dadu and dida have demonstrated what resilience can mean. I must also remember my friends and comrades from the earlier days of political activism. Though we have had some differences, they still remain an intrinsic part of my thoughts and research. It is my duty to especially remember my debt to Chandrashekhar, who died before his time, in a struggle and at a place where we should have all been there with him. My father, among other things, taught me to read Marx. I wish he was here to share in my thoughts. Clem Alford has given me a home away from home, constantly reminded me that without music no language is complete and that it is not impossible to maintain a certain radicalism in the most despairing of days. Jayasri Banerjee-musician, thinker, incorrigible enthusiast, and luckily for me, also my mother-reminds me that origins and beginnings occur more than once in life. She keeps up hope for better days, not only for herself but also on my behalf, and on behalf of strangers whom I still hope to meet. Without her, this work could not have been conceived. And of course, Shailendra, even though so far away, offers me surprising proximities. And reminds me of the imminence of the future everyday.
The Subaltern: Political Subject or Protagonist of History?
South Asia-journal of South Asian Studies, Feb 24, 2015
The subaltern is a name that no one has claimed—it is neither identity nor ideality. That precise... more The subaltern is a name that no one has claimed—it is neither identity nor ideality. That precisely has been the power of this invented category—giving it immense political flexibility, narrative agility and innate resistance to being reductively or instrumentally used. Is it this that makes the subaltern a purely political subject who is socially or culturally marked, but only contingently? But then, the subaltern has also leaned towards ‘being’ the peasant now, the poor then, the woman and the Dalit sometimes. Indeed, one asks today if she could be the refugee, the migrant, the post-humanist ‘human’, bare life. Is the subaltern then really the protagonist of history? Or is it history itself that is the subject here, setting up the subaltern as a front figure? This essay tries to think through these questions surrounding the subaltern as a category, caught as it is between being a political subject par excellence and being a historical character. In this essay, I revisit Subaltern Studies as a specific moment in the tradition of thinking about the political in South Asia.
Time and Knowledge
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 1, 2013
Example and following
Contemporary South Asia, Oct 2, 2017
Comment on Skaria, Ajay. 2016. Unconditional Equality: Gandhi's Religion of Resistance. Minne... more Comment on Skaria, Ajay. 2016. Unconditional Equality: Gandhi's Religion of Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 19, 2022
South Asian Reflections The king is non-violent, though he kills Chaste, though he has women Trut... more South Asian Reflections The king is non-violent, though he kills Chaste, though he has women Truthful, though he lies Ever fasting, though he eats well A hero, though he uses trickery Rich, though he gives away. Kingship is rather strange! 1
Histories of History in South Asia
Critical Times, Jun 15, 2023
This essay is a critical homage to Ranajit Guha, who passed away recently in his hundredth year. ... more This essay is a critical homage to Ranajit Guha, who passed away recently in his hundredth year. Through a rereading of Guha's bilingual oeuvre-including his later writings in Bengali-the essay explores Guha's rethinking of time as he moved from Marxism to a critique of historicism to a disavowal of history to postcolonial criticism and ultimately to a cosmopolitical stance. It suggests that Guha's most important contribution to global critical theory is not his historiographical achievements but his unique phenomenology of time. Mobilizing both modern and non-modern semiotic, grammatological, and aesthetic traditions, Guha reconceived time as a function of the limits and possibilities of human language and argued that common lives and subaltern subjects could not be accessed without admitting to the heterogenous temporal constitution-"time-knots" as he would call them-of the contemporary. Thinking with Guha helps us make the general argument that emancipatory politics demands a radical reopening of the question of time and a stepping aside of the framework of modernity-an argument that other erstwhile Subaltern Studies authors such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee have recently made. The essay understands Guha's century-long political and intellectual journey as a metonym for our times, marked by an agonistic and unpredictable interplay of multiple pasts, losses, emergences, and futures.
Historic Acts? Santal Rebellion and the Temporality of Practice
Studies in History, Aug 1, 1999
An act is designdted 'historic' in two ways: one, if it is of such significance as to h... more An act is designdted 'historic' in two ways: one, if it is of such significance as to have changed the facts of life, and two, if it can be textualized into a narrative of 'facts'. That is, when the hitherto impossible appear as factual, history is made. And when facts appear as absolute and ...
Debt, time and extravagance: Money and the making of 'primitives' in colonial Bengal
Indian Economic and Social History Review, Dec 1, 2000
Indebtedness, it may be said, appears to be the most generalised manner of being in the world tod... more Indebtedness, it may be said, appears to be the most generalised manner of being in the world today. While indebtedness is the 'normalised' mode of everyday exist-ence for individuals in 'advanced' societies, what with credit cards and personal consumption banking, ...
Culture/Politics: The Irresoluble Double-Bind of the Indian Adivasi
Indian Historical Review, 2006
The Adivasi in India has emerged in the twentieth century as a powerful political imaginary. This... more The Adivasi in India has emerged in the twentieth century as a powerful political imaginary. This essay seeks to understand this uniquely'modern'phenomenon of our times-by which a people categorized as' primitive', or at least'originary', as the term Adivasi implies, become ...
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2016
Elementary Aspects of the Political
The Review of Politics, 2020
South Asia - Sumit Sarkar: Writing social history. x, 390 pp. Delhi, etc.: Oxford University Press, 1997. Rs. 570
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Oct 1, 1999
This is an account of the Ramakrishna Movement, focusing on its female wing and in particular on ... more This is an account of the Ramakrishna Movement, focusing on its female wing and in particular on one all-women monastic institution in Kerala. The author, an anthropologist from Sydney, spent some months in 1980-81 with a Nayar family in Trichur, before settling in the nearby Sri Sarada Mandiram. She draws also on a shorter visit to Sarada Math, the institution's headquarters in Calcutta. The first hundred pages concentrate on history, starting from the Bengal Renaissance. They relate the careers of the divinized founder Ramakrishna (d. 1886), his wife Sarada Devi ('Holy Mother'), and his pupil Vivekananda, and trace the changing role of women in the Movement—the autonomous Women's Order was founded in 1953, the centenary of Sarada's birth. Meanwhile the movement had spread to Kerala, and an ashram had grown up near Trichur on the basis of a charitable village school for Harijans. However, the author is not primarily an historian, and all this is background to the ethnography. The Mandiram complex lies across the road from the male Asrama, and embraces a wide range of activities including a nursery school, girls' hostel and high school, classes in typing and Sanskrit, and a small college. The institution also owns land and employs day labourers. The math itself contains some 21 inmates pursuing their vocation. There are four ranks. Having survived a year as preprobationer, a successful candidate is officially recognized as probationer. Four years later, at headquarters, she receives the gayatri mantra, takes her vows and dons the white sari of the brahmacaririi. After five more years she repacks her mosquito net and returns to Calcutta to experience the performance of her own funeral rite (sraddha) and to assume the ochre clothing of the samnyasini. At the top of the hierarchy is the President. Though she may use her powers with forbearance, they are very extensive, almost dictatorial. There is much that can be criticized here: diacritics and transcription; index (what is the point of giving 81 unclassified page references to Ramakrishna samnyasinisi); erratic proofreading and missing footnotes; failure to mention that the bibliography, and apparently the text, have not been updated since 1981. Even then reference might have been made to S. Sinha and B. Saraswati, Ascetics of Kashi: an anthropological exploration, Benares, 1978. The author thinks that under hypergamy the donor is always superior to the recipient (p. 212), and like many critics of Dumont, she underestimates the subtlety of his texts: his celebrated essay on world renunciation operates at a certain level of abstraction and is by no means unaware of compromises between idealtype renunciation, represented by solo itinerant mendicants, and religion as practised within society. Nevertheless there is plenty to savour. Often the atmosphere comes through in vivid anecdotes and reactions—the stink of the cheap ration rice served to children in the main dining hall, the lightening of mood when an ailing and irritable President is temporarily absent, the marked coldness towards newcomers, who are expected to demonstrate their vocation by 'adjusting' and by tolerating neglect and scolding. The emphasis on personal purity is intense, being complicated by menstruation— not to mention the occasional homoeroticism. The exquisite sensitivity to seniority and hierarchy is interestingly related to social patterns in the Nayar taravad, the large matrilineal joint households now virtually obsolete in lay society (but how different are the Movement's institutions in other states?). Synchronically too, the monastic institution is not treated as an isolate: it was regarded as an exploitative employer of agricultural labour, and its relations with the surrounding Harijan villagers were unambiguously bad. A paragraph that may be picked up concerns the nature of renunciation. The author sees the legal separation of renouncer from parents less as a unilateral abandonment than as secondary to the ritual death at the sraddha, which is followed by rebirth within the spiritual lineage of the guru (pp. 175-6). For male Brahman renouncers this would be, symbolically speaking, a third birth. In her conclusion the author presents the Mandiram as an institution that has failed to adapt its ideology to changing socio-political circumstances and faces a bleak future. This seems to be presented as a dispassionate judgement rather than a matter of regret. At any rate there is little evidence of warmth or sympathy towards the personnel or aspirations of the movement, even in the acknowledgements. It would be interesting to hear the other side of the picture from a cheerful and experienced inmate.
Social History, Jul 3, 2014
The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with p... more The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
Book Review: Partha Chatterjee, Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Bodhisattva Kar eds, New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices
Indian Economic and Social History Review, Apr 1, 2016
Partha Chatterjee, Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Bodhisattva Kar eds, New Cultural Histories of India:... more Partha Chatterjee, Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Bodhisattva Kar eds, New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 480.
Eelco Runia. Moved by the Past: Discontinuity and Historical Mutation
The American Historical Review, Jun 1, 2015
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Papers by Prathama Banerjee