Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

  The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

  David Cumin of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, a key driving force in the targeting of academics critical of Israel Zionist Extremism and the Threat to Academic Freedom in Aotearoa New Zealand In the landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand's higher education, the university is legally mandated to serve as the "critic and conscience" of society. This role is not merely a professional privilege; it is a democratic necessity. However, this mandate is increasingly under siege by external political actors who seek to weaponize inflammatory rhetoric to police the boundaries of scholarly inquiry. A recent public statement by David Cumin of the Israel Institute of New Zealand—calling me a "terror justifier" and demanding an apology for my appointment to the National Counter Extremism Research Centre—offers a visceral case study in what I consider to be the rise of Zionist extremism as a direct threat to academic freedom. The Context: Why This Centre Exists and Why My A...

In this picture, my great grand uncle, Sir J C Ghosh, scientist and the founding Director of my alma mater, IIT Kharagpur, the first IIT. Also the place where my dad worked for half a decade. So did two of my uncles. Two of my cousins preceeded me in studying here and two of my cousins, women engineers, went to study here after me. Seated (L to R): Meghnad Saha (Astrophysicist) Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (Biologist & Physicist) Sir Jnan Chandra Ghosh (Chemistry Electrolysis and lonization) Standing (L to R): Snehamoy Dutta (Physicist) Satyendranath Bose (Bose Einestein theory) Debendra Mohan Bose (Physicist) NR Sen (Physicist & Mathematician) Jnanendra Nath Mukherjee (Chemistry, Colloid Chemistry) NC Nag (Biologist) In the telemetry room of the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Bengaluru headquarters, screens pulse with real-time data from a lunar orbiter navigating the Moon’s shadowed craters. Algorithms, refined in Indian laboratories, guide autonomous corrections with pre...