Objective: The objective of this two days Interdisciplinary National Conference on “Postcolonialism: Indian Response and Transformation” is to trace India’s specific responses to colonialism and to underline the negative impacts of colonialism on Indian Society. Through this conference we will try to address the intricacies of current time, to identify the indigenous traits of the Indian society, to landmark the intellectual developments of the postcolonial time and to make a better academic understanding of the same among researchers, students and the masses.
Proposed outcome of the conference-
- To access the impact of colonialism.
- To analyse the period of transformation.
- To trace the intricacies of contemporary India.
- To identify the indigenous traits of the Indian society.
- To landmark the intellectual developments of the Postcolonial Indian times.
- To develop better understanding of Postcolonialism among researchers, students and masses.
Main Theme: Main theme of this two days national conference “Postcolonialism: Indian Response and Transformation” would be that Postcolonialism is not only an impassable and sprawling concept indeed it is the current critical condition through which young nations like India has been going through after decolonization. Colonialism, which was Eurocentric in its very nature, brought enlightenment, modernity and industrialisation to the colonial societies and as a repercussion stagnated the spontaneous growth of the aboriginal legal, historical and cultural traditions of the indigenous. Not only that but the Incipience of the notion of academics and the beginning of study of specified fields of knowledge are itself products of colonial modernity and enlightenment. The Hegelian-Marxist understanding of History and the Smithian economics evolved parallelly with colonialism and if said in Foucauldian terminology, academic fields of anthropology and philology etc. emerged purely as byproducts of colonial epistemology to imply, maintain and propagate power equations between the coloniser and the colonised.
Colonial form of knowledge not only procured Eurocentric academic understanding of the European other but also promulgated huge and complex terminologies for the same. Now the terms like native, aboriginal, local, indigenous which was used by the colonisers to denote the colonies, bears specific meanings given by the colonisers in specified sociological and legal context and are not identical to the post-colonial European other. It also created cultural political intricacies and identity crisis for the prospective postcolonial societies.
Independence to these societies proved to be more of a physical and political phenomenon rather than a liberating force of their indigeneity. Furthermore, colonies were very specific to its empirical manifestation and responses, in ways of approach, resistance and retribution to colonization and foreign rule i.e. violence in freedom struggle had been vocalised and justified by Frantz Fanon whereas in India Mahatma Gandhi emphasized on ahimsa for the same. Likewise, after decolonisation peculiar political equations and nationalistic patterns were unfolded into colonies. How specific India has been into its postcolonial responses to the colonial rule, how much aligned and consistent the aboriginal and post-colonial political, religious and economical dimensions of the Indian indigenous are, till what extent the collective social memory, aboriginal laws and native identities have been entangled and entwined by the foreign elements of colonial rule, the incessant combat of the native and the foreign and the postcolonial identity crisis are the important points to be focused in the main theme.
Sub-Themes: To be more precise and focused about the traits of “Postcolonialism: Indian Response and Transformation”, the main theme is divided into four main sub-themes, covering the main domains of postcolonial India-Postcolonialism: Perspectives from History and Literature, Postcolonial Socio-Political Responses, the Post-Colonial Legality in India and Indian Economic Transformation. Proposed topics under these sub-themes are as mentioned below-
1. Postcolonialism: Perspectives from History and Literature
- Postcolonialism: Responses from the Colonies (India & Africa)
- Hannah Arendt and Mahatma Gandhi’s reflections on violence and non-violence
- Dehumanisation of the Colonies and the Wretched of the Earth
- Postcolonialism and the hybrid spaces: Destruction and construction of new spacesAnswer in Master’s Language: Writing as Translation?
- Subaltern History: A Conceptual Crisis?
- Vernacular modernity: A counter thesis to European Modernity?
- The Aryan Hypothesis: Scam of colonial Historiography?
- Hinduism: The Making of Christian Other in Ninetieth century
- War of information and propaganda in the colonies
2. Postcolonial Socio-Political Responses
- From Bio-power to Queer theory: politics of sex, gender and desire
- Desiring-production: Anti-Œdipus (1972): a frame beyond Freudo-Marxism ?
- From Accidental Nationalism to Flag Nationalism: The secular India
- Castes of Mind and the Non-cast Hinduism
- From Oriental Despotism to Democracy: Responses from India and Pakistan
- The European Other: Idea of Tribe, Indigenous and the aboriginal
- The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Post colony
- Loss and Recovery of Social Self Under Colonialism
3. The Post-Colonial Legality in India
- Codification and Textualization of Colonial Indian Laws
- The Euro-centric bias of the Indian Colonial Laws and Legislations
- ‘The Legal Others’ within the Colonial Laws: The Indigenous People, the Tribal and the Adivasis
- Post-Colonial Criminal Laws in India
- The Adoption of the Western Concept of Development in India in context of the Land Acquisition Laws
- Introspection and Rethinking the Human Rights Discourse in India
- The Violence and the Silences in the Language of the Indian Laws
- The Right to Equality in Post-colonial India: Reality or Myth?
- The Archaic Colonial Personal Laws in Post-Colonial India: A relic of the Past?
4. Indian Economic Transformation
- Poverty and Famine in colonial India: Through the lances of The Entitlement Approach
- From Asiatic mode of production to the Political Economy: Indian Economical transformation
- Economic Growth versus Development debate: Response from Indian Sub-continent
- Indentured Laborers and the making of India Diaspora
- Structural adjustment program (SAPs): Poverty Reduction or Neo-colonialism?
- Changes in Macro-economic variables in pre-and post-economic reforms the world systems perspective: A way ahead
Faculty Conveners:
Dr Tripti Srivastava (tsrivastava1@amity.edu)
Mob.- 9868034431
Ms Swati Kaushal (skaushal@amity.edu)
Mob.- 9910418599
Mr Bhavya Nain (bnain@amity.edu)
Mob.- 9810005476
Date: 22nd & 23rd August 2017
Time: 9:00 am onwards
Venue: Moot Court Hall, Amity Law School, Amity University, Noida