Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

In its most recent version of attack on educational institutions, the BJP-led Indian state has targeted the hallowed Jawaharlal Nehru University of India, branding the University as anti-national. The initial round of police attack on the University has been followed up with attacks by RSS and BJP affiliated goons on University students and faculty associated with the University. A section of the mainstream media associated with the agenda of the Hindu Right, Times Now and Zee TV have catalyzed the attacks through the media trials of students and the broader University, repeat-broadcasted through 24/7 cycles and captured in hashtags and sound bytes. At the heart of the recent spate of attacks on the University is an event organized by a group of students on February 9 that raised questions about the legitimacy of the juridical process that led to the hanging of Afzal Guru, alleged to be associated with the attack on the Indian parliament in December, 2001. The media stories ...

The current moment of attack of the Indian State on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has been catalyzed by an active role of a section of the mainstream Indian media in fanning the flames of nationalism to feed a witch hunt. Police have entered the University to arrest students on charges of sedition, claiming that the students participated in anti-national activities. Students at JNU who had come together to organize a cultural evening to draw attention to the absence of juridical process in the hanging of Afzal Guru, an accused in the Indian parliament attacks of 2001, are in the midst of a national storm that have labeled them as separatists and as anti-national. And the media are key players in this story. Kanhaiya Kumar, President of the JNU Students' Union, has been arrested under the outdated sedition law that was ironically the very instrument used by British colonialists to thwart India's right to self-rule. The mainstream television media hav...

Professor Mukherjee, the head of a department and advisor to student groups when I was once a student, lived a life full of privilege, in the deeply held belief that he was intellectually and culturally superior and therefore, should rightfully command respect from his students. Professor Mukherjee was a special breed of Professors, Professors that came from well-to-do upper caste, upper class Bengali families in Kolkata to the small town.Many of these Professors came from Bengali Zamindari families and they ensured that the town knew of their Zamindari lineage. Professor Mukherjee's sense of superiority was embedded in his long-ingrained sense of Brahminical privilege, mixed in with a sense of ownership of high culture. In the faith that he was the chosen one, that his was the job of protecting the aesthetic aspirations of the academy, Professor Mukherjee made sure that he performed the task of extracting respect from his students. His studied seriousness formed the...

As professors, students, researchers, we live amid incredible privileges. These privileges are products of organizing structures of societies that enable and reward specific forms of participation while simultaneously undermining other forms of participation. One of the outcomes of an identity-based education that is all too ensconced in apolitical identity politics is its inability to interrogate the politics of knowledge production. As a consequence, in many of the classes we teach, we leave un-interrogated our own positions of privilege and the positions of privilege our students occupy. By being in the classroom, our students occupy positions of privilege. Especially so when access to education is a commodity, out of reach for large sections of the population. I am often struck therefore by students who walk into the classroom with the deeply held notion that they are Gifts of God, that they are special. An identity-based education that is propped up on the tools o...

Postcolonial scholarship offers an excellent theoretical anchor in interrogating the binaries that constitute colonial rationality, rupturing these dichotomies and bringing forth the fragments, disjunctures, and hybridities that are constituted in spaces touched by colonialism. Moreover, as an overarching framework for understanding questions of agency, postcolonial theory offers insights into the communicative processes through which the multiple disjunctures and flows are negotiated within and across global sites of colonial hegemony. As a conceptual node for entering into the theorizing of colonialism and the "inter-plays" of multiple cultural threads in postcolonial contexts, postcolonial scholarship offers an important framework for disrupting the monolithic narrative of Whiteness that is rooted in "othering." At its best, postcolonial scholarship interrogates the orientalist gaze, depicting the ways in which the gaze is intertwined with the materiality...

January 1. 2016. The beginning of the new year was marked by a sense of loss that I am continuing to struggle to make sense of. Around noon on the First of January, I received a frantic whatsapp message from my sister-in-law to call my parents in Hyderabad who had been trying to reach me for the previous twenty minutes. They wanted to speak with me about the deteriorating health of my uncle, Godaikaka, who had been going through dialysis for the past six months. As I called my parents in a state of anguish, they shared with me that Godaikaka needed to be shifted from Kharagpur to Kolkata because he had been having trouble breathing. As we were trying to figure out our schedules so we could get to Kolkata at the soonest, my parents received a call from my elder sister in Kharagpur that my uncle had passed away on the way to the hospital.   Over the last decade, I have lost many a family member in my large joint family. We often share as a family how the joys of a big fami...

I visited Singapore first in 2008 when a dear friend, then a professor at the Wee Kim Wee School put me in touch with another dear friend, then the Head of the Department of the Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. I was on sabbatical from Purdue University in the US and this was the first time that my spouse, who was then in India, and I would spend time together starting our family. These were six months of joy and wonderment. Six months of experiencing cultures, diversity of voices and traditions, and confluence of ancient traditions. We were expecting our first child then, and the six months flew by in a flurry. I cherished every bit of those six months in Singapore. I fell in love with the city, its Chinese New Year and Hari Raya and Thaipusam. The colors, aromas, and confluences of Singapore felt a welcome break from the monolithic culture of the US where I never really fit in, after having spent a decade there. Singapore and it...