Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

  The Pedagogy of Pujarini On Babasaheb's birthday, a note on the only literacy that matters: the literacy of our own investment in caste. A Savarna influencer's "media literacy" reels against a rural Bengali creator, read step by step, turn out to be an unintentional master class in caste, gatekeeping, and the feudalism at the heart of Internet 5.0 in India. I made myself watch every single one of Aishwarya Subramanyam's Instagram reels on Pujarini Pradhan. All of them. Twice, in some cases, because I wanted to be sure I was not being uncharitable. I was not. What Aishwarya — who posts as @otherwarya and has built a tidy following as an "internet-appointed truth speaker," to borrow a phrase from a glossy profile of her — calls "media literacy" is not media literacy. It is the sound of Savarna anxiety dressed in the borrowed vocabulary of critical theory, performed for an audience that has been trained to mistake vocabulary for analysis. ...

In the drawing rooms and Instagram feeds of liberal Kolkata, Adivasi culture enjoys a special status. It is "ethnic" in precisely the right way — never threatening, always aesthetic. The delicate silver jewellery from Jharkhand or Odisha becomes the perfect accessory, a subtle nod to one's progressive tastes. Adivasi motifs printed on a Tant or Baluchari sari, or woven into the border of a kurta, signal just the correct amount of cosmopolitan chic. "How vibrant," the upper-caste Bengali antel (that self-styled intellectual) exclaims, posting photos from a handicraft fair or a curated "tribal" fashion event. It communicates refinement, cultural openness, and a fashionable distance from crass majoritarianism.This love for the exotic Other is selective and safe. It romanticizes Adivasi life as timeless, artistic, and consumable — something to be incorporated into Savarna wardrobes and lifestyles without disturbing the hierarchies that structure everyday ...

  The Colonial Frontier: Settler Violence, Energy Imperialism, and the Crisis of the Global South How Israeli–U.S. Aggression Reveals the Terminal Logic of Northern Capital and Why the Global South Must Respond Mohan Jyoti Dutta Professor and Dean’s Chair in Communication, Massey University; Founding Director, Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE)   The escalating Israeli–U.S. military aggression across the Middle East and beyond is not an aberration of the liberal international order. It is, rather, the order’s logical terminus. What the world is witnessing—from the ruins of Gaza to the threats levelled against Iran and the destabilization of Venezuela—is the violent convergence of settler colonialism and imperialism, now operating in their most undisguised form. This convergence is not incidental. It is structurally determined by the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, which, having exhausted the possibilities for accumulation thro...

  On Karan Johar's "Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani" and the mall-culture modernity it peddles as liberation There is a particular kind of Indian modernity that arrives wearing a chiffon saree and a halterneck blouse, speaking in a convent-school accent, jhumkas swinging like punctuation marks at the end of every knowing sentence. It quotes Tagore between sips of single malt. It performs feminism in the drawing rooms of Lutyens' Delhi. It calls itself progressive while never once interrogating the caste of its cook, the class of its cleaner, or the labour that upholsters its chesterfield. This modernity has a name, and her name is Rani Chatterjee. Karan Johar's Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani has been received in certain quarters as a film that "takes on patriarchy," that "challenges toxic masculinity," that "celebrates feminism." One must ask: whose feminism? Whose patriarchy? Whose challenge? Because what the film actually stage...