The Politics of Belonging in Contemporary India; Anxiety And
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THE POLITICS OF BELONGING IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA This volume looks at the emerging forms of intimacies in contemporary India. Drawing on rigorous academic research and pop culture phenomena, the volume: • Brings together themes of nationhood, motherhood, disability, masculinity, ethnicity, kinship, and sexuality, and attempts to understand them within a more complex web of issues related to space, social justice, marginality, and communication; • Focuses on the struggles for intimacy by the disabled, queer, Dalit, and other subalterns, as well as people with non-human intimacies, to propose an alternative theory of the politics of belonging; • Explores the role of social and new media in understanding and negotiating intimacies and anxieties. Comprehensive and thought-provoking, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of political studies, sociology, sexuality and gender studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, and minority studies. Kaustav Chakraborty is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Southfield (formerly Loreto) College, Darjeeling. He was formerly a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Dr Chakraborty has edited Indian Drama in English, Tagore and Nationalism (co-edited with K.L. Tuteja), and is the author of Indigeneity, Tales and Alternatives: Revisiting Select Tribal Folktales. In addition, he has published articles in journals such as Feminist Theology, Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, and many other reputed journals. His research interests include indigenous literature and culture, queer theory, and cultural studies. THE POLITICS OF BELONGING IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA Anxiety and Intimacy Edited by Kaustav Chakraborty First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Kaustav Chakraborty; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kaustav Chakraborty to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-56294-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-27307-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-29598-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC To My Students of Southfield, Darjeeling CONTENTS List of contributors x Preface xii Introduction: the politics of belonging: anxiety and intimacy 1 Kaustav Chakraborty PART I Intimacy, marginality, and anxiety 19 1 Identification, belonging, and the category of Dalit 21 K. Satyanarayana 2 Emotions in the context of caste slavery: exploring the missionary writings on Kerala 29 P. Sanal Mohan 3 Nature and belonging: distance, development, and intimacy 46 R. Umamaheshwari PART II Rethinking intimacy, contemporarity vis-à-vis the conventional institutions 65 4 Intimacy in Tamil kinship 67 Isabelle Clark-Decès viii Contents 5 Reading queerness: same-sex marriages in India 75 Sayan Bhattacharya 6 Homes as conversions: literalising the metaphor of Ghar Wapsi 87 Arunima Paul PART III Dissident body and belonging 99 7 Anti-caste communitas and outcaste experience: space, body, displacement, and writing 101 Dickens Leonard 8 Disability and intimacy in the making of Madurai Veeran 126 Shilpaa Anand PART IV Space, vigilance, and getting intimate 143 9 The modern-day sex worker: the intimate ‘Other’ of intimacy and belonging 145 Chandni Mehta 10 Public spaces and private intimacies: the ‘Politics of Belonging’ in parks 167 Pranta Pratik Patnaik 11 Queer intimacies in the time of new media: when Grindr produces alternative cartographies 180 Silpa Mukherjee PART V Textual belongings 191 12 Intimacy, belonging, and masculinity in Bhalachandra Nemade’s novel Kosla (Cocoon) 193 Mangesh Kulkarni 13 Hesitant intimacy: North East Indian English poetry vis-à-vis the Indian nationhood 203 Sarat Kumar Doley Contents ix PART VI Techno intimacies 217 14 Maternal intimacies online: how Indian mom bloggers reconfigure self, body, family, and community 219 Sucharita Sarkar 15 Routing techno intimacy, risk, anxiety, and the ambient political 240 Geeta Patel Index 257 CONTRIBUTORS Shilpaa Anand is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU), Hyderabad, India. She completed her PhD in the Interdisciplinary Program in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, U.S.A. Sayan Bhattacharya is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, U.S.A., and is involved in queer activism in Eastern India. Isabelle Clark-Decès was formerly Professor, Department of Anthropology, at Princeton University, in New Jersey, U.S.A. Dr. Clark-Decès’s research interests are in South Asia, with a focus on the Tamils of South India. Sarat Kumar Doley teaches English at the Department of English and Foreign Languages, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tezpur University, Assam, India. He has also authored a number of articles in the field of North East Indian literature in English and Tibeto-Burman Linguistics. Mangesh Kulkarni teaches Political Science at Savitribai Phule Pune University, India. His publications include Global Masculinities (2018). Dickens Leonard teaches at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad, India. He largely works on caste, religion, and culture. Chandni Mehta is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Her research interests include gender, labour and sexuality, especially in the context of sex work. Contributors xi P. Sanal Mohan is Associate Professor at the School of Social Sciences of Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, India. He combines history and ethnography in his research on colonial modernity, Dalit Movements, and Christianity in India. Silpa Mukherjee is a doctoral candidate in the Film & Media Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Her current research interests include media infrastructures, circulation, and contraband. Geeta Patel is the Director of UVA in India and Associate Professor at the Uni- versity of Virginia, U.S.A. Dr. Patel has three degrees in science and a doctorate in interdisciplinary South Asian Studies from Columbia University, New York, U.S.A. Pranta Pratik Patnaik is Assistant Professor at the Department of Culture and Media Studies, Central University of Rajasthan, India. He has worked on issues of gender, sexuality, and body image in Indian media. Arunima Paul teaches literature, visual studies, and gender studies at California State University, Los Angeles, USA. Her teaching and research interests include literary and visual studies, popular culture, decolonial, and postcolonial studies. Sucharita Sarkar is Associate Professor at D.T.S.S College of Commerce, Mumbai, India. Her doctoral thesis investigated mothering narratives – specifically memoirs and momblogs – in contemporary India. K. Satyanarayana is Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies, EFL Univer- sity, Hyderabad, India. His areas of interest include Dalit literature, literary history, Indian literatures, and cultural studies. R. Umamaheshwari is a fellow at Nantes Institute for Advanced Study, France, and an independent journalist and academic researcher. As a former fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, she has worked on displacements due to developmen- tal projects and on Tamil Jaina history. PREFACE The Latin etymology of ‘intimacy’ imparts the notion of making known (intimare) what is innermost (intimus) to a close friend (intima). Intimacy, thus, conveys an idea of sharing by acknowledging an urge of belonging together, almost inseparably. The paradox of intimacy lies in the fact that it is objective but personal, somatic nonetheless psychological, affective in its dimension yet without having a firm reflective/self-conscious foundation, and most importantly, dependent on ‘other’ but belonging together in such a manner so that the sharp distinction between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ erases out. The notion of Intimacy thus proves that the self cannot resist from belonging to the other, or to be specific, that the self can only be known through the other, where it seems possible that the innermost qualities can be shared. Here comes the question of choice. Unlike the bond with non-person, intimate bond among human beings depends on, firstly, the palpable possibility of sharing and, secondly, on the mutual consensus and commitment of belonging from both the parties. Is the tangibility of such probability of intimacy purely apolitical? Are the motivations for belonging, through closeness/fidelity, fully impulsive