Women and the Emergence of the Postcolonial Public in India

Ethnographic work conducted recently in different parts of India’s northeast suggests that the emergence of a public sphere in the postcolonial context has not brought about either any significant reordering of existing gender relations, nor the total subordination or exclusion of women from its ambit.

The emergence of the postcolonial public is thus problematic insofar as it calls upon women to perform the public without the necessary preparation for it, that is to say, ‘without the postcolonial being fully present’. The postcolonial public thus represents a site where many historical times are coeval with each other.

How do we think of the public in those critical moments when women emerge in the modern sphere of politics? This talk seeks to decipher the messiness of the postcolonial public in its three relatively distinguishable moments, which we tentatively describe as the neo-traditional, the translational and the repressive.

 

 

Dr. Samir Kumar DAS is Professor of Political Science and presently the Dean, Faculty of Arts at the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India. Formerly Vice-Chancellor of the University of North Bengal, Adjunct Professor (2014) of the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University and Visiting Professor of the School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (2015), he is presently the Coordinator of the University Grants Commission-Departmental Research Support (UGC-DRS) Programme on ‘Democratic Governance: Comparative Perspectives’. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow (2005) of the Social Science Research Council (South Asia Program) and specializes in and writes on issues of ethnicity, security, migration, rights, justice and democracy.

 

 

RSVP (inscription obligatoire): maya.judd@sciencespo.fr