Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The month, December, in 1992  when hate destroyed a mosque.  Based on a planted narrative  in the name of my religion.  That day in 1992  when hate destroyed a mosque. December 6, 1992.  #DismantleHindutva December 6, 1992. December 6, 1992. Thirty years have passed. I had just entered college. The wintry month of December was National Service Scheme (NSS) camp. A small group of us students had gone on the camp truck to the local market to get vegetables for the camp. The cool December air wrapped our faces as we sat on the back of the truck, the warmth of the sun pleasantly interrupting the cold air. As the afternoon rolled in, the news spread that Babri masjid, a mosque in Ayodhya (the place; although the Hindu epic Ramayana refers to Ayodhya as the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram, there is no empirical evidence archeologically or historically to suggest that the Ayodhya of Ramayana is the same as the place Ayodhya), had been attacked by Hindutva mobs...

One of the important findings of our research team over the last two years has been the identification, mapping, and tracking of Hindutva groups in Aotearoa New Zealand. These groups have been present in Aotearoa New Zealand for over two decades, in the form of organizations aligned with the Hindutva ideology (see the presentation with Richa Sharma) and digital platforms circulating the Hindutva ideology. This interplay of digital platforms and brick-and-mortar organizations makes up the disinformation and hate ecosystem of Hindutva.  The interplay simultaneously enables multi-layered messaging and targeting strategies. For instance, the attacks carried out by Hindutva extremists digitally, targeting Dalits, gender-diverse communities, Muslims, and dissenting voices online offer the communicative infrastructure for targeted attacks by brick-and-mortar organizations. The brick-and-mortar organizations draw on the narrative structures crafted by digital Hindutva extremism. The anon...

Planting and circulating disinformation is one of the key strategies of the far right.  Disinformation propels hate, often through the juxtaposition of information.  Juxtaposition in the context of disinformation places two pieces of information side-by-side, creating a frame that seeds doubt, manufactures ulterior motivations that seemingly drive the target of the hate, and places a label on the target.  In the attacks launched by Hindutva on me, my scholarship, and the work of CARE, I have witnessed closely the ways in which juxtaposition is deployed to create false frames, which are key ingredients in the mobilization of hate. Globally, we witness the deployment of juxtaposition by Hindutva trolls to target academics , activists , communities , and other dissenting voices .  The violence of Hindutva both online and offline, both in India and in the Indian diaspora, draws upon the strategic creation of frames that cast the targeted person as "anti-Hindu" " Hindupho...

From fieldwork I woke up the morning of Mahalaya 2022 with a WhatsApp message, playing the video of sunrise on a sea beach, new age music in the background, and a couple performing salutation to the Sun god সূর্য নমস্কার (“Surjo nomoshkar”), their poses stretched to perfection. The message that went with the video invited the recipient of the video to open their Mahalaya mornings with “Surjo nomoshkar” (spelled as “Surya namaskar” in Hindi text in the video).   A casual glimpse into the video interrupted my much-anticipated Mahalaya morning, replete with the anticipation of waking up to the sound of Birendra Krishna Bhadra’s “Rupang dehi” playing in the background.   It took me a few minutes to rework myself into the Mahalaya mood as I turned to waking up the children so they can join in the experience of listening to the age-old Mahalaya performance, (Mahishashur Mardini).   Now you might ask, what does receiving a WhatsApp invitation to a sun salutation have to do wit...

Solidarity with Hong Kong protestors event organized by CARE, with colleagues and activists One of the profound lessons in carrying out justice-based scholarship is the role of a wider collective.  My public scholarship and the public scholarship of CARE would be just about impossible without the embodied support and nourishment offered by an entire infrastructure of care.  This infrastructure holds us in joy, kindness, and security, comforting us amidst the targeted attacks, and nourishing us with strength and courage.  To articulate claims for justice and to raise questions that challenge the status quo requires academics and our wider networks to turn within and beyond to find courage.  In my journey with struggles to raise claims at the "margins of the margins," the courage I draw upon is rooted in the wider collective.  It emerges from the many friendships with activists who embody courage in their questioning of structures, who offer insights into strategi...

  As a social scientist studying the effects of oppressive practices on the health and wellbeing of communities at the margins, I am struck by the ways in which power organizes to silence our scholarship. Voices of communities at the margins articulating their experiences of health, situating these experiences of health in relationship to the organizing of oppressive structures, and organizing to resist these structures threaten both economic and political power.  Power, therefore, resorts to a wide array of strategies to silence scholarship.  It does so through a wide array of communicative strategies that include fabricating lies, planting erroneous artifacts as evidence, deploying communicative inversions, and weaponizing offline-online networks to carry out attacks on academics. In the context of the authoritarian regime, power is threatened when voices of households negotiating poverty or voices of migrant workers foreground the exploitative conditions of work and li...

One of the powerful transformations brought on by almost four decades of relentless pursuit of neoliberalism, followed by the ascendance of fascist politics across India as a form of late neoliberal governmentality is the rearrangement of desires in intimate spaces. From households to familial contexts to broader extended arrangements, affective registers have been reshaped by the relentless pursuit of more and more.  The ever-expanding spheres of individualized desires rendered as natural have organized the self around the relentless pursuit of greater consumer comfort.  This pursuit of consumer comfort is simultaneously reworked to extract from relationships the returns that optimize pleasure.  Simultaneously, the construction of dissatisfaction as the way of life forms the basis for the desire for the market. Relationships are thus defined by their use value in offering the greatest pleasure at the least effort. There is an underlying ideology of efficiency that shapes...