Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

In Chakrabarty’s ‘Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the critique of history’, the author argues about the often unacknowledged and unavoidable referent of an imagined “Europe” in the way we write history and the social scientific theoretical thinking. Few excerpts: The dominance of 'Europe' as the subject of all histories is a part of a much more profound theoretical condition under which historical knowledge is produced in the third world. …all other histories are matters of empirical research that fleshes out a theoretical skeleton that is substantially 'Europe'. In this blog, I seek to juxtapose the above mentioned highlights with the scenario of absence of history of northeast in the history textbooks. Recently, there has been an increase in racial attacks on the northeastern people. However, racial discrimination against the people of the northeast in mainland India is not a new  phenomenon.   Northeastern people, who look different from the oth

On reading Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?", I was jolted by her exploration into how we can touch the consciousness of the people even as we investigate their politics and on the assertion that what is important in a work is what it does not say. Here, she delves into what I consider to be a certain technicality and experience in the process of a researcher's interaction with the participant that I have sometimes encountered and which always leaves me breathless and at a loss for words afterwards. Spivak describes: with no possibility of nostalgia for that lost origin, the historian must suspend as far as possible the clamour of his own consciousness so that the elaboration of the insurgency, packaged with an insurgent-consciousness, does not freeze into an "object of investigation" or worse a model for imitation. The subject implied by the texts of insurgency can only serve as a counter possibility for the narrative sanctions granted to the colonial s

“McDonaldization is the process by which the principles of fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society, as well as of the rest of the world.” The five basic dimensions of McDonaldization process are efficiency, calculability, predictability, control, and the irrationality of rationality (Ritzer, 1996) . In India, the influence of fast food is more profound in the big cities and more subtle in small cities. In spite of the criticisms by nutritionist and from other spheres, there has been a widespread of fast food over the past few years. The public seems to turn a blind eye to it.  McDonalidization has become global and it has even emerged in  the sums of India. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, the size of India’s fast food industry is expected to double in between 2013 and 2016, to $1.12 billion. This exponential growth of fast food industry has caught attention lately. The most worrying fact is that fast food is replac

At the heart of CCA is ‘praxis’, or ‘doing social change’, for a lack of better terminology. However in any given context, what kind of change we seek to make could differ on the basis of what the community we engage in wants or lacks. The oppressive conditions that CCA seeks to change, with the use of communication, are tied to the neoliberal processes that believe in free-market economy. In Communicating Social Change Dutta (2011) writes ‘The neoliberal logic is fundamentally an economic logic that operates on the basis of the idea that opening up markets to competitions among global corporations accompanied by minimum interventions by the state would ensure the most efficient and effective political economic system’ (p.1). How then do these neoliberal processes affect specific contexts is crucial in identifying the change a CCA-practitioner aims for. Below I discuss the example of agricultural crisis in India. Kumar and Mittal (2009) in their article ‘Role of Agricultural

Ellen Gruenbaum's "Culture Debate over Female Circumcision: The Sudanese are arguing this one out for themselves" is as fascinating a read as it must be contentious. At once there are so many "maladaptive" parallels to female circumcision that one can think of, all varying in degrees - sati in India, foot binding in China, use of the burqa and extreme restrictions put on the movement of women in central Asia to even the high prevalence of type B diabetes in India which some experts have linked to how women are traditionally apportioned food in their households. Gruenbaum takes us through the interviews she conducted with Sudanese women who have lived with circumcision in all its forms and how these women regarded as arrogant outsiders' hegemonic perception of this practice. She also puts the practice under the dual test of "what functions does it serve" and "who benefits", and eventually gathers that the women are not the ones served no

In ‘Dialogue Theory in Marginalized Settings: A Subaltern Studies Approach’, (Dutta and Pal, 2010) propose that dialog in marginalized settings can be used to question the co-optation of subaltern populations into neoliberal agendas, and secondly dialogue can be used as a resistive strategy to engage the subaltern with the spaces of knowledge production that are inaccessible to them. The authors emphasize the importance sincerely listening to subaltern voices, finding the alternative knowledge claims that disrupt neoliberal hegemony and building solidarity with the subaltern. This approach to dialogue theory in marginalized settings has immense potential to bring about change in the ways knowledge is created and practiced in the academe as well as in society where the Eurocentric civil society maintains hegemony over public opinion and public discourse. Yet, when operationalizing this approach to dialogue theory, certain peculiar issues occur. The subaltern, traditionally mar

The paragraph “Theorizing about resistance offers opportunities for conceptualizing and enacting social change in the global arena, challenging the dominant structures of power that create and sustain the conditions of marginalization” from Pal and Dutta’s ‘Theorizing resistance in a global context’ instantly reminded me of the article “India's highway of death creates village of widows” by BBC on 28th September, 2015. This story highlights the resistance of the marginalized tribal south Indian villagers against the neoliberal forces of the state and its aftermath. It was published during the same period when the slogan of ‘Digital India’ peaked; a sheer contrast to the booming ‘Digital India’ agenda. The ongoing craze of ‘Digital India’ has gained spectacular attention from different spheres. People are showing their solidarity by flaunting their facebook profiles in the tricolor. One of the goals of the ‘Digital India’ project is to to empower 60,000 villages with broa