The charged emotional politics of language and identity in India

The history of emotions is one of the fastest growing fields in current historical debate. This is an introduction to the field, synthesising the current research, and offering direction for future study, moving beyond the traditional debate between social constructivist and universalist theories of emotion.

This book highlights the role of emotions in the contentious politics of modern South Asia. It brings new methodological, theoretical and empirical insights to the mutual constitution of emotions and mobilisations in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. As such, it addresses three distinct but related questions: what do emotions do to mobilisations? What do mobilisations do to emotions? Further, what does studying emotions in mobilisations reveal about the political culture of protest in South Asia? The chapters in this volume emphasise that emotions are significant in politics because they have the power to mobilise. They explore a variety of emotions including anger, resentment, humiliation, hurt, despair, and nostalgia, and also enchantment, humour, pleasure, hope and enthusiasm. The interdisciplinary research presented here shows that integrating emotions improves our understanding of South Asian politics while, conversely, focusing on South Asia helps retool current thinking on the emotional dynamics of political mobilisations. The book offers contextual analyses of how emotions are publicly represented, expressed and felt, thus shedding light on the complex nature of protests, power relations, identity politics, and the political culture of South Asia. This cutting-edge research volume intersects South Asian studies, emotion studies and social movement studies, and will greatly interest scholars and students of political science, anthropology, sociology, history and cultural studies, and the informed general reader interested in South Asian politics.

On 1 May 1960, Bombay Province was bifurcated into the two new provinces of Gujarat and Maharashtra, amidst scenes of great public fanfare and acclaim. This decision marked the culmination of a lengthy campaign for the creation of Samyukta (‘united’) Maharashtra in western India, which had first been raised by some Marathi speakers during the interwar years, and then persistently demanded by Marathi-speaking politicians ever since the mid-1940s. In the context of an impending independence, some of its proponents had envisaged Maharashtra as an autonomous domain encompassing a community of Marathi speakers, which would be constructed around exclusivist notions of belonging and majoritarian democratic frames. As a result, linguistic reorganisation was also quickly considered to be a threat, posing questions for others about the extent to which they belonged to this imagined space. This book delivers ground-breaking perspectives upon nascent conceptions and workings of citizenship and democracy during the colonial/postcolonial transition. It examines how processes of democratisation and provincialisation during the interwar years contributed to demands and concerns and offers a broadened and imaginative outlook on India’s partition. Drawing upon a novel body of archival research, the book ultimately suggests Pakistan might also be considered as just one paradigmatic example of a range of coterminous calls for regional autonomy and statehood, informed by a majoritarian democratic logic that had an extensive contemporary circulation. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of South Asian history in general and the Partition in particular as well as to those interested in British colonialism and postcolonial studies.

This ethnographic study of Dalit Lutherans in South India examines how the lived religion of Dalit Christians contests the structures of caste domination in rural Andhra. It shows how the emergence of Dalit Christianity generated new religious ideas, patterns, terrains, rituals, and practices that challenge the traditional notions of caste privilege and impact the politics of the region. It highlights the transforming role of Dalit agency in the development of Christianity, which is largely unexplored in the studies of Christian missions and anthropology of Christianity in India. The book looks at the social history of Christianity, critical events of protest, platforms of community politics, caste ideology, and local politics and interlocking of caste with congregation to provide a constructive critique of the dominant paradigm of the Dalit movement, which often treats Dalits as a homogenous social group. It discusses the pragmatic changes within the politics of Dalit Christianity as viewed from the margins of Indian society and incorporated through engagement with political ideologies (from communism to the Ambedkarite movement) and religious belief systems (from Hinduism to Christianity). This volume at the intersection of religion and caste will be an essential read for students and researchers of Dalit studies, political studies, sociology, sociology of religion, religious studies, social justice and exclusion studies, and South Asian studies.

This book presents a history of English and development of language education in modern India. It explores the role of language in colonial attempts to establish hegemony, the play of power, and the anxieties in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century India. The essays in the volume discuss language policy, debates and pedagogy as well as larger overarching questions such as identity, nationhood and sub-nationhood. The work also looks at the socio-cultural and economic factors that shaped the writing and publishing of textbooks, dictionaries and determined the direction of language teaching, specifically, of English language teaching. Drawing on a variety of archival sources — policy documents, books, periodicals — this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of linguistics, language teaching, cultural studies and modern Indian history.

Moving beyond the existing scholarship on language politics in north India which mainly focuses on Hindi–Urdu debates, Language Politics and Public Sphere in North India examines the formation of Maithili movement in the context of expansion of Hindi as the ‘national’ language. It revisits the dynamic hierarchy through which a distinction is produced between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ languages. The movement for recognition of Maithili as an independent language has grown assertive even when the authority of Hindi is resolutely reinforced. The book also examines increasing politicization of the Maithili movement — from Hindi–Maithili ambiguities and antagonisms, to territorial consciousness, and subsequently to separate statehood demand, along with the persistent popular indifference. Mithilesh Jha examines such processes historically, tracing the formation of Maithili movement from mid-nineteenth century until its inclusion into the eighth schedule of the Indian constitution in 2003.