Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Figure 1: Screenshot of the online shop mentioned in Banerjee's social media There is a very old story in Bengal, and in every part of the subcontinent shaped by the long arm of Brahminical order, about who gets to speak and who must be silent. It is a story that begins, in the textual imagination, with molten lead poured into the ears of the Shudra who dared to hear the Veda, and with the severed thumb of Ekalavya, who dared to learn archery without the permission of his caste superiors. The story is told as if it belongs to a finished past. It does not.  It continues, with a different set of props, a different vocabulary, a different set of delivery platforms. The lead is no longer molten. The thumb is no longer severed with a blade. The weapon now is a Facebook post with three hundred and sixty-two likes, written in an English that prides itself on its elite-school polish, announcing that a rural feminist video blogger from the margins of Bengal must submit herself to an examina...

  "A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight": Trumpism, White Supremacy, and the Genocidal Grammar of Empire The president's threat to annihilate Iran is not an aberration. It is the latest installment in a five-century war on the global majority — and it demands a politics equal to its scale. On the morning of April 7, 2026, the President of the United States posted the following words to his personal social media platform: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will." He then added that "now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?" He concluded by congratulating "the Great People of Iran" on the imminent end of "47 years of extortion, corruption, and death." Read it again. Read it slowly. A sitting president, speaking...

  In a tiled kitchen somewhere in East Midnapore, a woman in a cotton saree leans toward her phone camera between stirring something on the stove and answering a child off-frame. She is talking, in English, about Stanley Kubrick. Then about Premchand. Then about the way the panchayat in her village handles a woman who walks out of her marriage. Her vowels are round in places the Bombay-Delhi ear has been trained to flag. Her grammar occasionally folds in on itself the way self-taught grammar does. She does not apologise for any of it. She just keeps talking, and the Reel keeps rolling, and somewhere between the Kubrick and the Premchand a small earthquake travels up through the fibre-optic spine of the Indian internet and lands, with an audible crack, in the drawing rooms of South Bombay and South Calcutta. Her name is Pujarini Pradhan. She is a rural Bengali woman who married young, taught herself to read the books she wanted to read, and now, in 2026, runs one of the most-watch...

In the early hours of Easter Sunday 2026, as American pilots were being fished from the Persian Gulf after a high-stakes rescue mission, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social what may stand as the clearest distillation yet of how a particular strain of cultural extremism has fused with the machinery of state power. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” he wrote. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” The post was not an aberration. It was the logical endpoint of a worldview that has moved, over the past decade, from the margins of American conservatism into the operational grammar of Western foreign policy.  A bridge in Karaj, Iran struck by US airstrikes, Associated Press A culture-centered analysis—one that treats foreign policy not as abstract strategy but as an extension of deeply held cultural narratives about civilization, b...