Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Recently, I made a post about the city of Kolkata and its contributions to global intellectual history.  Figure 1: My original LinkedIn post In response to the post on LinkedIn, an account launched an ad hominem attack, claiming his city Bangalore is better than my city Kolkata (although I didn't really claim in the post that Kolkata is my city), followed by calling Kolkata a city that produces pseudointellectuals like me.  Full disclosure, I did point to the person posting that Bangalore is a hub of Hindutva hate, that produces misogynist Hindutva disinformation on technological platforms and circulates this hate on platforms (posting the link to the following blogpost about the #BrahminGene campaign that was launched by a Bangalore-based entrepreneur:  The ideological infrastructures of racist Brahminism, Indian techno-capital, and architectures of violence ). The term pseudointellectual is often used by Hindutva to discredit critical analyses of Hindutva propaganda....

Figure 1: Caste discrimination at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) This blog piece builds on my earlier analysis of the convergences and collaborations between Brahminism and white supremacy . I have argued previously that white supremacy , based on its ideology of inherent racial superiority, parallels and reproduces Brahminism, the ideology of the superiority of the Brahmin varna (caste).  A key ingredient of the Indian caste system is its belief in the stability of the category of caste, passed on hereditarily, and to be managed through strict communicative practices that maintain racial purity (marriage, food, employment, housing, access to water etc.). The Hindu constructs of the caste system played a critical role in shaping colonial race science, with colonial administrators and record keepers forming their earliest categories of racial hierarchy based on the caste system, learned through their ad/ventures into India.  The racist hierarchy of inherent categories...

Figure 1: Ethnographic fieldwork in Jangal mahal, West Bengal, India, guided by Adivasi advisory groups and in partnership with Adivasi community researchers Wrapping up the year in 2024, as I reflect on the key methodological registers of the CCA amidst the global ascendance of whiteness, crystallized as white supremacy that is mainstreamed into politics and policy making, I offer in this blog post some reflections on the sustenance of the CCA.  Before I turn to the question of sustenance, I want to outline a key concept that anchors the CCA: body on the line . Body on the line Culture-centered scholarship calls on researchers to place our bodies on the line in solidarity with struggles that we write about. Body on the line is not a call to posturing risk-taking or claims-making to activism. Instead, as an intervention into methods of knowledge production in the social sciences, it is a basic recognition that the nature of knowledge production is embodied.  Indigenous and l...

  The Free Speech Union has a problem with, you guessed it, Free Speech! In its latest round of performing victimhood (white, male, heteronormative, cisnormative), the Free Speech Union (FSU) tells us that it is triggered by Te Kungenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University offering its academics the choice of using Toitū te Tiriti (meaning “honor the Treaty”) in an electronic email signature. In this opinion piece, I will argue that this attack on the university is part of a broader ideological project of the FSU that seeks to concoct a crisis around the university, simultaneously mobilising around the ideologically-driven organised attack of the far-right targeting of Te Tiriti we are currently witnessing in Aotearoa New Zealand. This concoction of the crisis of the academy and the crisis of democracy is central to how the FSU seeks to reorganise universities and democracy in Aotearoa to align them with its broader far-right agenda. This project of reworking universities is evi...

I woke up this morning to a story that appeared in Stuff, concocting a crisis that is supposedly brought about by the serving of non-vegetarian food at some Diwali events in Aotearoa NZ. Titled as "Non-vegetarian food served at some Diwali events sparks debate among Indian communities," it establishes as normative, through its assumptions, the notion of Diwali being a vegetarian religio-cultural event (this juxtaposition of religion and culture is critical, as I will unpack in the rest of this blog). On other digital platforms, the title reads as: 'My festival is being hijacked': Food divides NZ's Indian community. The headline is crafted to feed moral outrage around food, built around the practice of non-vegetarian food being served at some Diwali festivals in Aotearoa New Zealand. Monolithic frames and Hinduism's pluralism The article then leads in with, "Non-vegetarian food served during Diwali celebrations in Wellington has left some Hindu organisatio...

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...