Growing up in the mofussil in a context of the trade union movement and rural organizing, I learned early on from my everyday environment to be suspicious of the category of the "Calcatian antel" aka the "intellectual" or the "intellectual of the Calcutta brand." You identify this kind with its class history as a collaborator of the power elite. High on rhetorical flourish, and vacuous in substance, this is the class that will make all kinds of commitments about solidarity when convenient and disappear when solidarity is actually needed in struggles of change. With a father working as an extractive manager for one of the large corporations that inhabited Calcutta of the 1960s and 1970s, the Calcatian antel went to an elite convent in South Calcutta, and then to one of the elite Calcutta institutions where the children of the well-heeled go. Having grown up very much as a class collaborator, the village and the rural and the poor didn't ex
This blog offers Mohan Dutta's reflections on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach, examining the interplays among Structure, Culture, and Agency in shaping marginalisation and the ways in which communities at the margins challenge structures. Writings on the blog are continually being revised to reflect the organic analysis of structure and agency.