Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, a prominent American far-right activist and founder of Turning Point USA, has sparked a wave of coverage in New Zealand’s mainstream media. Outlets such as "Stuff", "The New Zealand Herald", and TVNZ have reported on Kirk’s death, often framing him as a charismatic conservative figure who galvanized young voters in the United States, particularly within Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.  However, this coverage has been strikingly selective, painting a sanitized portrait of Kirk that conveniently erases his deeply troubling legacy of inflammatory rhetoric, attacks on academics, promotion of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and contributions to a climate of violence.  As a scholar of communication and advocate for decolonizing media narratives, I argue that New Zealand’s mainstream media’s whitewashing of Kirk’s legacy perpetuates a dangerous erasure of his role in fostering division and harm, reflecting a broader failur...

The patriarchal landscape of North India, interwoven with the ideological currents of Hindutva, thrives on deeply rooted cultural practices that devalue women and perpetuate gender-based violence. Central to this matrix is the preference for the male child, a cultural artifact that intersects with Hindutva’s nationalist agenda to amplify misogyny and justify systemic oppression.  In the North Indian states from Bihar to Rajasthan, where these dynamics are acutely visible, the triad of sexual violence, family violence, and alcoholism sustains a cycle of harm, exacerbated by disinformation and propaganda that falsely attribute the determination of a child’s sex to the mother. North Indian upper caste men thrive on this disinformation, playing the victim while perpetuating systemic sexual, physical, and family violence. The relentless capacity of caste privileged Hindi-Hindutva men to manufacture the oppressed male victim forms the infrastructure of moral degeneracy and violence, disp...

Anchored in the culture-centered approach (CCA), which I have championed as a framework for amplifying marginalized voices and knowledges against colonial and hegemonic structures, the convergences between the Māori argumentation tradition and the diverse Indian argumentation traditions—Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Adivasi, and Dalit—reveal a shared commitment to relationality and resistance.  Māori whaikōrero, the eloquent oratory of the marae invoking ancestors and environmental ties, finds resonance with Indian traditions of dialogical exchange, all of which reject adversarial Western debate in favor of collective meaning-making rooted in cultural and communal contexts. The Māori practice of whakawhanaungatanga (building relationships through dialogue) aligns with Hindu nyāya and Buddhist vāda, where argumentation, as seen in the Nyāya Sūtras or Pali Canon debates, seeks harmony and contextual truth rather than domination, mirroring CCA’s emphasis on subaltern epistemologies as deco...

Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke delivering her powerful performance of haka The radiant leadership of Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, a young Māori MP, exposes the fragility of whiteness in Aotearoa, as white supremacist frameworks respond with envy to her unapologetic advocacy for tino rangatiratanga. The response of the infrastructure of whiteness to her brilliance also exposes something else, the deep undercurrent of jealousy that forms the ecosystem of white fragility. Jealousy, that visceral pang of resentment, is a quiet undercurrent in the everyday life of settler colonialism.  It festers in mundane interactions, in workplaces, academic halls, and social media feeds, often cloaked in civility or passive aggression. Whiteness, the hegemonic values of white culture, propped up as universal, continually deploys jealousy under the performance of civility. Jealousy works as an everyday tool for the expression of white rage at the excellence of people of color.  An excellent public spea...

[I write this piece as an upper caste, upper-class academic, who through the privileges accorded by caste, and through friendships with Adivasi intellectuals, organizers, and activists, is continually learning about the violence that is scripted into my caste position in the academe]. Imagine the upper caste, upper middle-class Calcutta antel, the daughter or son of a corporate executive or a professor or a doctor, sipping their whisky in their Calcutta living room in one of those South Calcutta neighborhoods, surrounded by other caste privileged friends that followed the same trajectory, St. Xaviers and then perhaps Jadavpur or Presidency, the spaces of radical posturing among the caste privileged, and declaring, "The subaltern can't speak. For if the subaltern was heard, s/he would no longer be subaltern." An entire infrastructure of caste privileged radical posturing that shapes the intellectual zeitgeist of postcolonial theory derives from the unquestioned privilege o...

  Image from Wikipedia In the kaleidoscope of India’s pluralistic tapestry, the ideology of Hindutva has emerged as a corrosive force, cloaking its moral bankruptcy in the seductive language of complexity. The refrain, “there is no black and white,” is wielded not as a call for nuanced understanding but as a deliberate strategy to obfuscate accountability, silence dissent, and normalize violence. I argue that Hindutva’s invocation of complexity is a rhetorical sleight of hand—an attempt to sanitize its supremacist agenda while entrenching systemic harm against India’s marginalized communities. In complexity, Hindutva, a morally corrupt ideology formed on fascist ideals, finds the argumentative infrastructure that legitimizes its everyday moral and ethical transgressions. Hindutva, the political ideology rooted in the vision of a Hindu Rashtra (nation), thrives on the erasure of India’s syncretic history. It constructs a monolithic Hindu identity that marginalizes Muslims, Christi...

Bollywood’s cultural narratives often serve as contested spaces where societal values, moralities, and ideologies like Hindutva intersect.  The films "Dil Dhadakne Do" (2015, dir. Zoya Akhtar) and "Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani" (2023, dir. Karan Johar) exemplify this tension, particularly through the portrayal of male characters—Anil Kapoor as Kamal Mehra and Dharmendra as Kanwal Lund—who embody immorality through infidelity, non-ownership of the infidelity, and abusive behavior.  Despite their transgressions, both films construct narrative arcs that excuse or sanitize this immorality, projecting a veneer of liberation while ultimately reinforcing the patriarchal, upper-caste, North Indian Hindi-speaking Hindutva culture.  The communicative inversion that turns Kamal Mehra and Kanwal Lund into victims of their circumstances forms the narrative infrastructure of Hindutva misogyny, incorporating within the discursive space claims of liberation and emancipation whil...