Skip to main content

My dissertation: Subalternity and Indigenous Existence: Negotiating Development Issues from the Margin

From a communicative perspective, this study seeks to understand how development operates as discourse, in creating and perpetuating conditions of structural absences, and how the subalterns at the margins negotiate and enact their agencies in legitimizing their voices and participatory actions in the discursive spaces. Historically, colonial and Brahminical doctrine portrayed indigenous subalterns as inferior and sub-human; subsequently, modernist epistemology driven dominant development approach labeled them as objects or sites of reform and control. Mainstream development communication approach employed unilateral tailored interventions in diffusing development, and transferring technology in the underserved spaces to ‘modernize’ the subalterns. Increasingly structural, cultural, and contextual issues have received importance in the contemporary theories of communication for development and social change. This study embraced the theoretical and methodological framework of the Culture-Centered Approach wherein the development processes, and subaltern negotiations are theorized at the interstices of culture, structure and agency of subaltern sectors. Attending to the co-constructive epistemic foundation of Culture-Centered Approach, I engaged in nine months long ethnographic field research in indigenous villages of jungle, Himalayan, and coastal regions of eastern India; over which I conducted 75 in-depth interviews, and wrote filed notes and reflexive journal entries. My study documents articulations and agentic enactments of indigenous subalterns in negotiating with material and communicative in-accesses. Studying the dialogic and participatory engagement of indigenous villagers, this research situates the subalterns as key stakeholders in identifying, and prioritizing situated development needs, as well as in planning, organizing, and implementing local development initiatives (e.g. building a mini-hospital, and constructing walls to protect sacred trees and stones) to address structural shortages. This research foregrounds alternate development rationalities as emerged from the subaltern articulations, (a) in challenging the dominant discourses and conceptualizations of development, and (b) in legitimizing subaltern consciousness and praxis in bringing about social transformations.
Some Relevant Images:
Fieldwork Sites: 

 Himalayan Villages: Buxa-Duar Region
Jungle Villages: Purulia Region
Coastal Villages: Sundarban Region

Field work process:
Collection of ‘Development’ related keywords
Visual Cards (Road, Transportation, Health)
During Fieldwork
Development Project Decisions

Development Project Locations:
 Village: Saloni (Jungle Region)
Village: Chunabhati (Himalayan Region)

Mini-Hospital Project:



Protection Wall Project:


Information Kiosk Project: Prototype Testing:

 Initial version developed at Purdue University
 Collective Sketching Sessions
 Visual Representations: Local Culture
Visual Representations: Local Business and Agricultural Activities

Media Reports:




Popular posts from this blog

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...
Read more

Upper caste Indian women in the diaspora, DEI, and the politics of hate

Figure 1: Trump, Vance and their partners responding to the remarks by Mariann Edgar Budde   Emergent from the struggles of the civil rights movement , led by African Americans , organized against the oppressive history of settler colonialism and slavery that forms the backbone of US society, structures around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) formed an integral role in forging spaces for diverse recognition and representation.  These struggles around affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion were at the heart of the changes to white only immigration policies, building pathways for migration of diverse peoples from the Global South.  The changes to the immigration policies created opportunities for Indians to migrate to the US, with a rise of Indian immigration into the US since the 1970s into educational institutions, research and development infrastructures, and technology-finance infrastructures. These migratory structures into the US were leveraged by l...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...
Read more