1 00:00:03,670 --> 00:00:08,470 Thank you. Thank you so much, Zubia, should we invite people to turn on their videos? 2 00:00:08,470 --> 00:00:13,000 What do you think folks want to do that while you're doing that? 3 00:00:13,000 --> 00:00:20,710 I will get my screen share up and I hope without any mishap. 4 00:00:20,710 --> 00:00:25,000 There we go. I hope you can see that. OK, wonderful. 5 00:00:25,000 --> 00:00:32,410 Thank you. So as Obama for the wonderful invitation and for the very warm introduction. 6 00:00:32,410 --> 00:00:36,280 And thank you all from wherever you are zooming in. 7 00:00:36,280 --> 00:00:37,960 It's a real pleasure. 8 00:00:37,960 --> 00:00:48,010 And I'm really I was really delighted to receive this invitation from Zubia because it gives me an opportunity to try out some new ideas, 9 00:00:48,010 --> 00:00:52,810 which is what seminars and forums like this are so wonderful for. 10 00:00:52,810 --> 00:00:57,250 And in particular, as you can tell from the title of the talk, 11 00:00:57,250 --> 00:01:04,570 I wanted to use this as an opportunity to reflect on what it has meant for me as a professional historian to 12 00:01:04,570 --> 00:01:12,400 engage over the past couple of decades with a number of goddesses who have succeeded in capturing my imagination, 13 00:01:12,400 --> 00:01:20,170 in disturbing the terms of my engagement with official archives, in troubling the categories of my analysis, 14 00:01:20,170 --> 00:01:26,290 and in redirecting my work along parts that I had not envisioned before. 15 00:01:26,290 --> 00:01:32,590 My unanticipated encounter with them compelling me to become, if you will, somewhat. 16 00:01:32,590 --> 00:01:39,400 Godus aware this awareness, I have to say, Oh, let me see. 17 00:01:39,400 --> 00:01:50,230 I'm having trouble. OK, this awareness, I would insist, does not imply a nostalgia for religious forms that would oppress cells and impede reason, 18 00:01:50,230 --> 00:01:59,380 but rather a willingness to enter into productive assemblages with these goddesses and see where this willingness takes me. 19 00:01:59,380 --> 00:02:09,640 You have to take my word. I had I did not in the beginning seek out these multi armed miracle working beings of my own accord. 20 00:02:09,640 --> 00:02:20,800 Instead, they have erupted over and again in the most unexpected ways and places, demanding my attention and simply refusing to go away. 21 00:02:20,800 --> 00:02:26,770 The title of my presentation, as I was telling my dear friend Margaret Bernau, who is here, pays homage, 22 00:02:26,770 --> 00:02:36,760 of course, to Barney Cohen's wonderful essay, an anthropologist amongst historians, first published in 1962. 23 00:02:36,760 --> 00:02:44,590 But as I offer these comments, I'm also inspired by Gayatri Spurlock's confession in reflecting on her own engagement 24 00:02:44,590 --> 00:02:48,940 and the more surprising engagement with the goddess figure when she observed, 25 00:02:48,940 --> 00:03:02,500 quote, I am no longer beset by the need to occlude the traces of the irreducibly autobiographical in cultural speculations of the sort. 26 00:03:02,500 --> 00:03:10,120 So in that spirit, as I speak from the page of my autobiographical self as a professional historian, 27 00:03:10,120 --> 00:03:15,520 I should also note that unlike scholars of religion who work on the Indian subcontinent, 28 00:03:15,520 --> 00:03:21,820 especially feminist scholars of Hinduism for whom the goddess is indeed a staple, 29 00:03:21,820 --> 00:03:27,850 the respectable card carrying historian of modern India typically maintains a discreet 30 00:03:27,850 --> 00:03:34,780 distance from these sites of affective intensity that punctuate the Indic life world. 31 00:03:34,780 --> 00:03:41,920 We keep them at bay on the margins of our disciplinary practise, invoking them in passing sometimes perhaps, 32 00:03:41,920 --> 00:03:49,210 but then moving on all too quickly, almost as if we are embarrassed about what to do about them. 33 00:03:49,210 --> 00:03:56,980 If we incorporate them more centrally into our so-called Objectivists narratives. 34 00:03:56,980 --> 00:04:03,880 A secular subject like history faces certain problems in handling practises in which gods, 35 00:04:03,880 --> 00:04:09,430 spirits of the supernatural have agency in the world, writes the page. 36 00:04:09,430 --> 00:04:14,770 Chakrabarty, who I know is going to be speaking with you all in a couple weeks. 37 00:04:14,770 --> 00:04:21,940 Secular history, he argues, are usually produced by ignoring the signs of divine presences. 38 00:04:21,940 --> 00:04:30,790 Quote, Such histories represent a meeting of two systems of thought, one in which the world is ultimately that is, 39 00:04:30,790 --> 00:04:42,940 in the final analysis disenchanted, and the other in which the humans are not the only meaningful agents for the purpose of writing history. 40 00:04:42,940 --> 00:04:51,830 The first system, the secular one, translates the second into itself and quote What? 41 00:04:51,830 --> 00:05:03,730 In other words, use a libertarian phrase. The discipline is essentially robbed of Gotz as its good professional adherents conform to what, Alfred? 42 00:05:03,730 --> 00:05:10,330 Following Peterburg characterises as methodological heightism. 43 00:05:10,330 --> 00:05:17,770 So what happens when the professional historian wilfully ceases to honour this great divide between the 44 00:05:17,770 --> 00:05:29,080 disenchanted Wally and the supernatural extraordinary and instead allows the godly to power her narrative? 45 00:05:29,080 --> 00:05:37,180 As I explore this question, I also consider how the goddess conspires and collaborates with enchanting labour 46 00:05:37,180 --> 00:05:43,930 of the image to destabilise the certitudes of my prosaic social science analysis, 47 00:05:43,930 --> 00:05:48,730 compelling me into the visual turn upon which many historians have, 48 00:05:48,730 --> 00:05:53,950 somewhat reluctantly, I should say, embar visual work, in fact, 49 00:05:53,950 --> 00:06:01,930 spurs the disciplinary historian into a realm not constituted exclusively by words and texts, 50 00:06:01,930 --> 00:06:08,530 even as it reveals truths otherwise occluded by focussing entirely on the verb. 51 00:06:08,530 --> 00:06:13,600 I make no case for the sovereignty of the visual image or the artwork. 52 00:06:13,600 --> 00:06:24,970 On the contrary, a shuttling back and forth between the discursive and the figural is critical, I would argue, to the method of the image historian. 53 00:06:24,970 --> 00:06:30,070 But this very act of shuttling has also convinced me of the capacity of the 54 00:06:30,070 --> 00:06:36,250 image to operate as an agent with power over people who believe in that power. 55 00:06:36,250 --> 00:06:48,040 To invoke Peterburg, visual history has enabled me to puncture the received narrative and to append recognised truths, propelling me in the process. 56 00:06:48,040 --> 00:06:56,410 Interstate's of rapture that frequently accompanies new discoveries and revelations, if only momentarily, 57 00:06:56,410 --> 00:07:04,090 before the disenchanting professional protocols of the discipline inevitably reassert themselves. 58 00:07:04,090 --> 00:07:12,340 The goddess, as it were, seises that window of opportunity before the historicism imperative sets in and inserting 59 00:07:12,340 --> 00:07:20,350 herself into my narrative begins to fundamentally transform its tenor and texture. 60 00:07:20,350 --> 00:07:29,980 Even as they engage in this analysis, I am all too aware of the risk of opening the gates of the seemingly safe space of secular 61 00:07:29,980 --> 00:07:37,480 history to this divine beings who also power the imaginary and politics of Hindu nationalism, 62 00:07:37,480 --> 00:07:47,140 which has dug itself deep into the Indian democratic landscape with its own brand of illiberal enchantment, especially in the past decade and more. 63 00:07:47,140 --> 00:07:54,460 As I don't have to remind this audience, I would insist nonetheless that the very act of historicism, 64 00:07:54,460 --> 00:08:04,540 of putting the gods in their time and in their place is an important safeguard since fundamentalisms are by definition a. historical. 65 00:08:04,540 --> 00:08:10,180 Nevertheless, I concede that this is a highly charged tightrope walk. 66 00:08:10,180 --> 00:08:14,500 But I hope to convince you in the next half hour or so that it is worth it. 67 00:08:14,500 --> 00:08:24,010 As I introduce you briefly to these extraordinary beings who have taken over my professional life the first to do so. 68 00:08:24,010 --> 00:08:29,440 And I'm going to go into autobiographic using the autobiographical Vanel beginning of the beginning. 69 00:08:29,440 --> 00:08:35,320 The first to do so was Mother Thumma referred to in Thumma in various ways, 70 00:08:35,320 --> 00:08:47,260 but most frequently is Thamrin thig the language spoken by millions both in India and in the Diaspora, imagined as goddess, queen and mother. 71 00:08:47,260 --> 00:08:52,540 She's a figure virtually unknown at the time, a life full before the late 19th century, 72 00:08:52,540 --> 00:08:59,140 when she appeared in response to in response to various pressures of colonial modernity, 73 00:08:59,140 --> 00:09:05,260 ranging from the pedagogical to the governmental in very many tantalising ways, 74 00:09:05,260 --> 00:09:13,360 in prose, poetry and ultimately in pictures like several that you will see here in which cartographic objects such as 75 00:09:13,360 --> 00:09:22,780 the map and the globe are used to locate her in the world in a manner that I would argue is highly modern. 76 00:09:22,780 --> 00:09:31,810 Thig came into my life when I was a graduate, when I was in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1980s, 77 00:09:31,810 --> 00:09:40,540 attempting to write a dissertation in the history department on the cultural politics of Tamil nationalism in 20th century India, 78 00:09:40,540 --> 00:09:44,470 a respectable historical subject and a very lively one. 79 00:09:44,470 --> 00:09:52,960 At that point, virtually nothing in the existing scholarship on the subject, then, especially in the English language, 80 00:09:52,960 --> 00:10:01,810 had prepared me for this embodied figure who I soon began to encounter everywhere in arcane literary musings, 81 00:10:01,810 --> 00:10:12,310 in mystical religious verses, in the populist poetry of the street, or almost all in fumer, and also in pictures such as these. 82 00:10:12,310 --> 00:10:23,380 If following the political theorist Jean Bennett, we agree that to be enchanted is to be simultaneously transfixed in wonder or excuse me, 83 00:10:23,380 --> 00:10:30,970 simultaneously transfixed in wonder and transported by sense to be caught up and carried away, 84 00:10:30,970 --> 00:10:41,050 that retie was certainly such an enchanted entity for those who sang and wrote about her and drew and painted her in very many different ways, 85 00:10:41,050 --> 00:10:54,130 but almost always varying about the allure of the sacred signified most frequently by the halo and by the by for arms and most nonhuman way of being. 86 00:10:54,130 --> 00:11:03,550 You will agree. She was, however, curiously absent in any form in the published and unpublished government documents in the 87 00:11:03,550 --> 00:11:09,700 official state archives that historians of colonial and post-colonial India typically turn to, 88 00:11:09,700 --> 00:11:18,610 in fact, begin with. And yet, whenever I left the safe space of the familiar official archives with its privileging 89 00:11:18,610 --> 00:11:24,640 of the English language and of prosaic narratives and read Tamil poetry and song, 90 00:11:24,640 --> 00:11:32,170 I frequently felt as if I was in what Philip Fisher has called a moment of pure presence, 91 00:11:32,170 --> 00:11:38,950 quote, thoughts, but also limbs are brought to rest even as the senses continue to operate. 92 00:11:38,950 --> 00:11:46,630 Indeed, in high gear, you notice new colours discern details previously ignored here. 93 00:11:46,630 --> 00:11:54,950 Extraordinary sounds as familiar. Landscapes or landscapes of scents sharpen and intensify. 94 00:11:54,950 --> 00:12:03,380 End quote. In other words, the contours of what I was so easily characterising in prosaic social science languages, 95 00:12:03,380 --> 00:12:10,100 Tamil nationalism began to blur and to take on other shapes and forms. 96 00:12:10,100 --> 00:12:17,450 Before long, I found myself abandoning the very framework of nationalism and identity politics with which I start 97 00:12:17,450 --> 00:12:24,290 had started several years earlier and under whose mandate my doctoral dissertation did get written, 98 00:12:24,290 --> 00:12:35,630 but which I now found too inadequate to capture the array of passionate attachments between the defied feminised and embodied language, 99 00:12:35,630 --> 00:12:41,330 a site of wondrous intensity and it's enthralled speakers. 100 00:12:41,330 --> 00:12:50,990 So I went on to develop a new analytica of Tamil devotional Thommo Patra, around which eventually my first book came to be written, 101 00:12:50,990 --> 00:12:56,300 albeit in the prosaic language of social science discourse and in English, 102 00:12:56,300 --> 00:13:05,270 but nevertheless now considerably leavened by the enchanting presence of the goddess in my narrator. 103 00:13:05,270 --> 00:13:11,480 I have come to see in retrospect that heeding the call of thunder thigh enabled me to 104 00:13:11,480 --> 00:13:17,990 respond to historian Pressingly Dworaczyk provocation to rescue history from the nation. 105 00:13:17,990 --> 00:13:23,750 In fact, perhaps even to hear that provocation entered the page Chakrabarty injunction not 106 00:13:23,750 --> 00:13:29,300 to write the history of other parts of the world as an already known history. 107 00:13:29,300 --> 00:13:36,720 Something which has happened already happened elsewhere and which is to be reproduced with local content. 108 00:13:36,720 --> 00:13:45,750 Ironically, then, it is my entanglement with this goddess who appears, by all accounts, is a throwback to a timeless past, 109 00:13:45,750 --> 00:13:53,430 which pushed me to begin engaging with one of the most productive of tones in history writing in the subcontinent, 110 00:13:53,430 --> 00:13:59,070 namely the post-colonial, with its emphasis on allowing the unassimilable, 111 00:13:59,070 --> 00:14:11,770 the untranslatable and the different to reverberate through the empty, homogenous and resolutely godless time of disciplinary history. 112 00:14:11,770 --> 00:14:21,070 My second protagonist is the much more well-known figure of mother India, also known as part of the Indian National Territory, 113 00:14:21,070 --> 00:14:28,870 also emerging from the late 19th century like Bamuthi as a goddess, queen and mother. 114 00:14:28,870 --> 00:14:34,690 This is also a figure that I had not set out to write about at all at first, 115 00:14:34,690 --> 00:14:43,060 my project and instead been conceived very much in response to the spatial turn in the social sciences and to the rise of 116 00:14:43,060 --> 00:14:51,880 what has been called geo humanities to focus on the formation of cartographic culture in colonial and post-colonial India. 117 00:14:51,880 --> 00:15:02,440 When, however, I began to look at and for maps of India from the early 20th century outside the official archives of the state, 118 00:15:02,440 --> 00:15:08,620 it was soon apparent that the territory called India in colonial maps from the late 119 00:15:08,620 --> 00:15:14,980 18th century or so onwards and laid out as empty cartographic space within the 120 00:15:14,980 --> 00:15:21,730 gridded frame of a network of latitude and longitude was also otherwise imagined as 121 00:15:21,730 --> 00:15:28,720 the body of modern India and gloriously pictured in all manner of visual media, 122 00:15:28,720 --> 00:15:35,110 ranging from oils and acrylics to chromatographs and even cinema. 123 00:15:35,110 --> 00:15:41,860 These are the products of the visual labours of artists who I have called Barefoot Cartographer's, 124 00:15:41,860 --> 00:15:50,620 even with no obvious training in the use of maps and the signs of their production or that or the aesthetics of their creation. 125 00:15:50,620 --> 00:15:58,210 These artists grab specialised artefact, one of the most prised innovations of the British Empire, 126 00:15:58,210 --> 00:16:03,700 and dislodge it from its official circles of circulation and use and put it to 127 00:16:03,700 --> 00:16:10,630 effective purposes and projects that exceed those of science or of the state. 128 00:16:10,630 --> 00:16:16,420 So here are some of the ways in which Indians were introduced to the figure of Mother India, 129 00:16:16,420 --> 00:16:24,850 especially those who did not go to school or take geography lessons in the company map of India in the company of modern India. 130 00:16:24,850 --> 00:16:35,140 She's either occupying and filling up the map or she's merging partially with it, or she's purged, seated or standing on it. 131 00:16:35,140 --> 00:16:46,510 And most scandalous of all, she dispenses with it entirely and comes to stand in herself for the Jewish body of India. 132 00:16:46,510 --> 00:16:57,940 Ironically, but not altogether surprising, given what we now concede about modern science's capacity to also generate new wonders, 133 00:16:57,940 --> 00:17:02,590 even ecstatic enchantment, the mathematics to map of India, 134 00:17:02,590 --> 00:17:08,800 the proud artefact of a secular colonising state and its sciences is in fact the 135 00:17:08,800 --> 00:17:16,060 essential guarantor of mother India's novel persona as deti of national territory. 136 00:17:16,060 --> 00:17:21,880 The map is indeed the very ground on which she appears and its presence. 137 00:17:21,880 --> 00:17:32,650 Sure. So the distinctive identity enabling her to not be readily confused with or mistaken for other ancestral goddesses like Durga, 138 00:17:32,650 --> 00:17:40,390 on whom she's clearly but not exclusively modern. And yet in being hijacked for the cause of the goddess, 139 00:17:40,390 --> 00:17:52,200 the secular scientific map is also anthropomorphised its abstract space filled with the sensuous, feminine and quite Hindu presence of mother India. 140 00:17:52,200 --> 00:18:00,870 In other words, one kind of enchantment is supplemented by another through the work of the barefoot cartographer. 141 00:18:00,870 --> 00:18:07,590 So in this manner, the goddess once again interrupted my disciplined pursuits and put pressure on a good 142 00:18:07,590 --> 00:18:14,070 social scientific question that I had been asking cued by my reading of Benedict Anderson, 143 00:18:14,070 --> 00:18:25,650 25 in each school, and a whole host of insightful scholars of cartographic science, namely, why does the nation long for cartographic form? 144 00:18:25,650 --> 00:18:33,540 The choreographed figure of Mother India asserted itself to remind me that this yearning for freedom does not 145 00:18:33,540 --> 00:18:41,760 only take recourse to abstract mathematics reasoning that undergirds the sciences of cartography and geography, 146 00:18:41,760 --> 00:18:51,600 but it was also radically supplemented in 20th century India by the anthropomorphic, the sacro and the maternal. 147 00:18:51,600 --> 00:19:01,380 And yet being cast in the company of the goddess is not without considerable risk, even to the point of threat to one's life and limb, 148 00:19:01,380 --> 00:19:08,640 as also witnessed in the late career of Moqbel, Fida Hussein, India's most famous modernist artist, 149 00:19:08,640 --> 00:19:13,740 one of whose paintings on Mother India you see on your screen. 150 00:19:13,740 --> 00:19:21,540 Muslim, though he might have been by both, Hussein was drawn from early on to the plethora of Hindu deities, 151 00:19:21,540 --> 00:19:31,380 especially goddesses who he painted on thousands of canvases with great artistic acumen, but also in a spirit of exacting, 152 00:19:31,380 --> 00:19:41,220 ecstatic abandon, not dissimilar to the love felt by the buttocks or the devotee for a chosen DETI celebrated in the 153 00:19:41,220 --> 00:19:49,320 decades after Indian independence as exemplary of India's much vaunted pluralism and secularism. 154 00:19:49,320 --> 00:19:58,110 These canvases return to haunt the artist in darker times, the very presence of the goddess on their painted surface, 155 00:19:58,110 --> 00:20:07,730 making him vulnerable to attacks from a resurgent Hindu nationalism with its own claims on the figure of Barat mother. 156 00:20:07,730 --> 00:20:19,370 This was especially the case when in 2005 that Godus made an insistent appearance in the work you see before you as a nude body in pain, 157 00:20:19,370 --> 00:20:25,430 the names of various Indian cities scattered across her torso with the words Bhopal 158 00:20:25,430 --> 00:20:33,030 and Gujarat sites of industrial and communal genocide etched on her bare breasts. 159 00:20:33,030 --> 00:20:36,780 The resulting furore, as many of you may know, 160 00:20:36,780 --> 00:20:41,820 sent the 90 year old artists into self-imposed exile from the country of his 161 00:20:41,820 --> 00:20:49,620 birth work and passions never to return until his death in London in June 2011. 162 00:20:49,620 --> 00:21:01,470 But it also brought Hussein a household name in the India I grew up in, into my professional orbit again in a manner that I had never anticipated, 163 00:21:01,470 --> 00:21:11,580 compelling me to insert his images into a tradition that has accumulated over the past century and more around the hallowed figure of modern India, 164 00:21:11,580 --> 00:21:19,590 but a tradition from which the work of Muslim artists like him have been radically cast out. 165 00:21:19,590 --> 00:21:30,840 Once again, the goddess had intervened to remind me that the historian of every generation has to rise and meet the obligation, even at great risk, 166 00:21:30,840 --> 00:21:37,410 to their own life and labour to recover the voices of past sufferers and therefore 167 00:21:37,410 --> 00:21:43,090 provide them with some small measure of secular salvation to invoke the. 168 00:21:43,090 --> 00:21:54,080 Here is what the Benyamin also writing at the moment of great peril to his personal life and, of course, world history. 169 00:21:54,080 --> 00:22:06,710 Indeed, Hussein's travails at the hands of ill I'm sorry, travails at the hands of illiberal forces caution us from assuming that Goddess's, 170 00:22:06,710 --> 00:22:15,440 however enchanted they might seem to have had an easy journey through India's complex secular modernity. 171 00:22:15,440 --> 00:22:24,020 Their anthropomorphic sovereignty left unchallenged the mixed fortunes of one ancient goddess whose origins, 172 00:22:24,020 --> 00:22:33,770 unlike birthmothers or thunder thighs, stretch way back into the distant beginnings of religious life in the region is a case in point. 173 00:22:33,770 --> 00:22:40,220 I speak of the divine being variously known in Sanskrit and other Indian languages as spirit. 174 00:22:40,220 --> 00:22:48,110 We who they be or rue motha our earth imagined as an embodied female whose existence in Indic 175 00:22:48,110 --> 00:22:56,570 imagination has been documented from the earliest known Sanskrit texts in premodern art practises. 176 00:22:56,570 --> 00:23:04,730 She has been especially manifest in the context of a rescue from the clutches of a cosmic demon by vadas, 177 00:23:04,730 --> 00:23:09,560 the BORGEAUD and third incarnation of the Peranich Super Deity. 178 00:23:09,560 --> 00:23:20,080 This new. Although there is considerable variation in how she's visualised across various media as indeed in how her rescue is imagined, 179 00:23:20,080 --> 00:23:32,710 more often than not it is cast as a beautiful, demure female, obviously in all of the men's male animal God who is her saviour. 180 00:23:32,710 --> 00:23:39,880 So in contrast to the fierce mother goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, she's typically not multi limned. 181 00:23:39,880 --> 00:23:49,090 She's more humanoid than divine, which may account for some of how her fate unfolds in modernity. 182 00:23:49,090 --> 00:23:55,750 Fast forward to the closing years of the 19th century and you can see the dramatic transformation 183 00:23:55,750 --> 00:24:03,250 in her representation when her sensuous female presence is displaced by another enchanted image, 184 00:24:03,250 --> 00:24:08,680 that of the Earth as the perfect sphere of scientific modernity. 185 00:24:08,680 --> 00:24:12,190 In fact, over the course of the 20th century into the present, 186 00:24:12,190 --> 00:24:21,880 this is the standard manner in which vast cosmic rescue mission is invariably visualised across numerous media, 187 00:24:21,880 --> 00:24:27,670 even in paintings and statues in context and contemporary temples. 188 00:24:27,670 --> 00:24:38,580 So sweeping is the displacement of the Feministe Earth by the inanimate spherical globe of scientific cartography. 189 00:24:38,580 --> 00:24:42,090 On the one hand, this is not surprising for us, 190 00:24:42,090 --> 00:24:48,900 I have documented under the force of what I have characterised as pedagogic modernity in British India, 191 00:24:48,900 --> 00:24:54,870 the terrestrial globe began to circulate an ever widening circles as a proxy 192 00:24:54,870 --> 00:25:01,380 for our planet and the material stand-in for what I have called modern earth. 193 00:25:01,380 --> 00:25:06,450 And yet, as I discovered in the course of my archival research, once again, 194 00:25:06,450 --> 00:25:15,660 when I left the frame of the official archives and went outside the context of colonial schools and educational missions, the Globe, 195 00:25:15,660 --> 00:25:17,640 centred on the map of India, 196 00:25:17,640 --> 00:25:29,010 was also put to the service of transforming Hinduism's many deities into Indian boards as they came to be visualised sitting or standing on it, 197 00:25:29,010 --> 00:25:33,900 holding it in their hands or simply placed in their company. 198 00:25:33,900 --> 00:25:44,690 As we see in this beautiful contemporary painting by Mesilla artist Shalini Kumari, where the goddess and the globe fuse into each other. 199 00:25:44,690 --> 00:25:51,380 Similarly, saw in a poster printed soon after Indian independence at the time when Prime 200 00:25:51,380 --> 00:25:59,990 Minister Nehru had firmly committed India to a path of scientific modernity. 201 00:25:59,990 --> 00:26:09,450 Indeed, if we are to go by the title of the print, the viewer is called upon to see the Gridded Globe itself as Abu Dhabi or Goddess Earth. 202 00:26:09,450 --> 00:26:13,100 It is a strategic ambiguity at play here. 203 00:26:13,100 --> 00:26:21,710 So it seems to be that on the face of it, Hindu gods are once again prevailed in a modernising, secularising India with the end, 204 00:26:21,710 --> 00:26:31,010 with the aid and alliance of the very instruments of secular science that ought to have banished them in the name of secularism. 205 00:26:31,010 --> 00:26:38,270 So just as the map of India distinguishes Mother India from a whole host of other goddesses, the terrestrial globe, 206 00:26:38,270 --> 00:26:44,570 the PRISE product of modern science enables poetry to also carve out a distinctive 207 00:26:44,570 --> 00:26:50,850 look for herself so she cannot be confused with the generic Hindu goddess. 208 00:26:50,850 --> 00:26:55,890 And yet this has not come without a cost, as we saw in the way the Globe displays us, 209 00:26:55,890 --> 00:27:02,550 are completely in some context or as we see in this image of the controversial Tamil politician, 210 00:27:02,550 --> 00:27:12,660 H.R. Raja, trying to combat global warming one hot summer in Chennai by pouring water or a mounted school globe. 211 00:27:12,660 --> 00:27:20,970 So even as pretty female form has to concede to return metal or plastic sphere, it is worth noting. 212 00:27:20,970 --> 00:27:30,360 And Rajah's action, the transfer of rights and rituals from the SAPOL body to the secular object placed on a lotus shaped pedestal, 213 00:27:30,360 --> 00:27:42,750 no less so due reverence has had to resort to some unexpected Salvationist strategies in the time of modern earth. 214 00:27:42,750 --> 00:27:44,430 So having been exposed, 215 00:27:44,430 --> 00:27:53,940 that's just such surprising encounters and unexpected appearances with these more than human beings from the other side of the secular divide, 216 00:27:53,940 --> 00:28:03,090 so to speak. One might say that the ground was well prepared for me to be a recipient to the hail of yet another goddess. 217 00:28:03,090 --> 00:28:11,930 And that's exactly what happened in October 2006. So here she is in all her glory. 218 00:28:11,930 --> 00:28:22,670 A brand new goddess generated on a computer screen in New Delhi and offered to the Dalitz of India as their salvation from centuries of caste, 219 00:28:22,670 --> 00:28:32,300 Hindu oppression. She takes the form, as you can see here, the familiar Statue of Liberty, but relocated now to a new home. 220 00:28:32,300 --> 00:28:40,420 The map of India, its critical western, northern and eastern boundaries all undone. 221 00:28:40,420 --> 00:28:47,140 Her formal name, as you can see, is English, the Dalit goddess, but since her birth, 222 00:28:47,140 --> 00:28:55,750 precisely on October 25th, 2006, on the two hundred and sixth birthday of Thomas McColley, 223 00:28:55,750 --> 00:29:04,270 the colonial administrator and Victorian historian was most associated with the pedagogical ascendancy of English in British India. 224 00:29:04,270 --> 00:29:16,780 She also came to be known the English, the Dalit goddess in Hindi as ungrazed of literally English goddess and Delamare, literally the Dalit mother. 225 00:29:16,780 --> 00:29:24,190 She's a product of the imagination of Delhi based Dalit men, the artist Shanti's Roubaud, 226 00:29:24,190 --> 00:29:35,140 and especially the journalist and public intellectual Chandra upon Prasad starting in 2004, but especially from 2006, 227 00:29:35,140 --> 00:29:40,300 Prasad spearheaded for a few years an intriguing or the short lived campaign 228 00:29:40,300 --> 00:29:46,420 to change the very terms of recognition for his fellow Dalitz by proposing 229 00:29:46,420 --> 00:29:59,550 that English be the sole language and that his fellow Democrats should resolutely turn their backs on the cost saturated spoken languages of India. 230 00:29:59,550 --> 00:30:08,760 As was the case with smoothy and mother India, the entry of English, the ballot Godus into my professional life, 231 00:30:08,760 --> 00:30:16,140 compelled me to begin asking new questions, this time about the Dalhart relationship to Indian languages, 232 00:30:16,140 --> 00:30:20,490 something that I had not considered at all in my early career, 233 00:30:20,490 --> 00:30:28,110 and the Dalit relationship to Indian nations space that is totally occluded in my work on mother India. 234 00:30:28,110 --> 00:30:34,470 Once again, a goddess figure manifested itself to interrupt my ways of thinking, 235 00:30:34,470 --> 00:30:41,760 create trouble for my past arguments, and redirect the flow of my work in new, productive ways. 236 00:30:41,760 --> 00:30:42,960 So for these reasons, 237 00:30:42,960 --> 00:30:52,710 I have not been persuaded to dismiss Prasad's short lived project as a clever attention getting gimmick or a performative access, 238 00:30:52,710 --> 00:30:56,560 as some critics will want to do. 239 00:30:56,560 --> 00:31:07,390 In their mind, mimetic capture of such an iconic image from from New York all the way to northern India from their location there. 240 00:31:07,390 --> 00:31:18,430 I want to underscore bold and Prasad's conspicuous refusal of markers that are visibly identifiable with the Indic universe, 241 00:31:18,430 --> 00:31:22,390 especially a Hindu Sanskrit symbolic word. 242 00:31:22,390 --> 00:31:30,950 This is what sets apart the iconography of the ballot baby from those fashioned for thigh or about that matter. 243 00:31:30,950 --> 00:31:39,070 There are few subterfuges of antiquity at work here, to borrow a phrase from political theorists, should be the coverage. 244 00:31:39,070 --> 00:31:45,370 Everything in this body scape, with the singular exception of the Buddhist spoked, 245 00:31:45,370 --> 00:31:55,780 which is largely novel to the iconographic landscape of modern India and is a product of its recent experience of modernity. 246 00:31:55,780 --> 00:32:04,180 The fountain pen, the floppy hat, the computer monitor, even the map of India. 247 00:32:04,180 --> 00:32:10,330 The Dalit intellectual Gopal Guru once wrote, quote, Ballots have no nostalgia, 248 00:32:10,330 --> 00:32:17,200 what they remember is only the history of humiliation and exploitation, end quote. 249 00:32:17,200 --> 00:32:25,240 In an invitation letter that Brassard sent out to commemorate the two thousand nine English day, he declared, quote, 250 00:32:25,240 --> 00:32:34,660 We will deactivates our roots based preferences caste, language, religion, culture, food, habits and lifestyle. 251 00:32:34,660 --> 00:32:39,970 We will realise that nostalgia is a sick psychological weapon of the dominant. 252 00:32:39,970 --> 00:32:49,610 For at least a few hours, we will sign off from the wisdom that we have never asked for and put. 253 00:32:49,610 --> 00:32:59,300 So this critical, anti nostalgic nostalgia might well be the signature sentiment animating this particular Dalhart visual politics, 254 00:32:59,300 --> 00:33:03,980 a politics that does not have to bear the burden of maintaining authenticity, 255 00:33:03,980 --> 00:33:10,250 purity and a commitment to a healthier parts that are essential to uppercuts status. 256 00:33:10,250 --> 00:33:20,120 Paradoxically, the historically oppressed Estancia Elia reminds us, have agreed to freedom to choose new symbols in the new global age, 257 00:33:20,120 --> 00:33:26,240 since they pretty much not invested in a part in a past that has oppressed them. 258 00:33:26,240 --> 00:33:35,060 So does this particular ballot immersion in a politics of what Aditya Nigam has called the here and the now free, 259 00:33:35,060 --> 00:33:44,270 the followers of gender bound for from the clutches of what anthropologist Jill Reese and Urmila Mohun have called veneration nation, 260 00:33:44,270 --> 00:33:50,390 the recursive culture of adulate practises and aesthetics that have acutely that 261 00:33:50,390 --> 00:33:55,310 they have acutely identified as coursing through the long haul of India's history. 262 00:33:55,310 --> 00:34:01,380 And that is especially visible in the charged social political movements around the Murti and Borith. 263 00:34:01,380 --> 00:34:06,680 Martha, the answer is not all that straightforward. 264 00:34:06,680 --> 00:34:13,640 In some of his writings, Brassard has clearly assigned the English goddess an important, performative, 265 00:34:13,640 --> 00:34:23,810 even ritual role that is revealing of his larger aspirations regarding the future place of English in India, especially Delyth, India. 266 00:34:23,810 --> 00:34:33,270 So he calls upon Dalit parents to show an image of the goddess English for a minute, as he puts it, to born Dalit infants. 267 00:34:33,270 --> 00:34:40,370 He then advises, and I'm quoting from this very long poem that is there on this poster that he has composed. 268 00:34:40,370 --> 00:34:46,670 But this is the verse I wanted to draw your attention to. OK, go ahead. 269 00:34:46,670 --> 00:35:01,220 Lean toward the baby, lean poetically, reach out the years first the left you whisper, now a, b, c, d, turn to the right. 270 00:35:01,220 --> 00:35:05,750 Whisper one, two, three, four. 271 00:35:05,750 --> 00:35:11,820 Enthralled God, English has embraced the baby. 272 00:35:11,820 --> 00:35:19,500 On the 30th of April 2010, the foundation stone for a new temple to the goddess English was laid in the school 273 00:35:19,500 --> 00:35:24,690 yard in Bunkerville Lockin Precursory District in Eastern with the British, 274 00:35:24,690 --> 00:35:29,040 a village of about 8000 souls, about 47 percent. 275 00:35:29,040 --> 00:35:35,250 The list, in the words of journalist is on and who attended the ceremony, quote, 276 00:35:35,250 --> 00:35:43,830 The chief priest was the suit clad children of the mantra chanted A, B, C, d. 277 00:35:43,830 --> 00:35:52,260 After a few speeches in Hindi emphasising the need for English amongst ballots and other oppressed groups, 278 00:35:52,260 --> 00:36:05,160 a 30 inch bronze idol was installed and a song composed by teachers of the school sold over the din London say sheltered i.e. and ungrazed. 279 00:36:05,160 --> 00:36:15,210 Dave Maiya computer Valdimir. He and grazi David Mia Hamm supported David Miia junkie David Maya. 280 00:36:15,210 --> 00:36:22,920 She hails from London. This gorgeous English. She reigns over computers, hail goddess English. 281 00:36:22,920 --> 00:36:28,950 She's everybody's goddess. She's goddess of the people the world over. 282 00:36:28,950 --> 00:36:33,810 In my own discussions with children born on this project, on this event, 283 00:36:33,810 --> 00:36:41,670 he noted that large numbers of Dalit women who attended the event are immediately translated his English, 284 00:36:41,670 --> 00:36:53,570 the Dalit goddess into ungrazed baby Maya, and even started to offer worship as we see in these some of these photographs from the moment. 285 00:36:53,570 --> 00:37:00,350 So I want to conclude by turning to the politics of affective embodiment that lies at the heart 286 00:37:00,350 --> 00:37:08,600 of India as veneration nation and the pressure that puts on me as a professional historian, 287 00:37:08,600 --> 00:37:13,760 even while I walk the tightrope that I spoke of earlier, relentlessly, 288 00:37:13,760 --> 00:37:23,980 historicism these figures as I go about my work, but also injecting the enchanted into my historical practise. 289 00:37:23,980 --> 00:37:27,850 In his autobiography, The Man Who would go on to become independent, 290 00:37:27,850 --> 00:37:34,900 India's first prime minister famously worried over his fellow citizens tendency to 291 00:37:34,900 --> 00:37:43,180 anthropomorphise a tendency which he put down to the force of habit and early associations. 292 00:37:43,180 --> 00:37:52,450 This was clearly something that Needle hoped we would get over in March forward on the path of scientific and secular socialism, 293 00:37:52,450 --> 00:38:03,790 guided by the spectral and formless spirit of the nation, quote, Often, as I look at this word, I have a sense of mysteries, of unknown depths. 294 00:38:03,790 --> 00:38:13,330 What the mysterious is, I do not know. I do not call it God because God has come to mean much that I do not believe in. 295 00:38:13,330 --> 00:38:22,150 I find myself incapable of thinking of ADT or of any unknown supreme power in anthropomorphic terms, 296 00:38:22,150 --> 00:38:30,600 and that the fact that many people think so is continually a source of surprise to me and quote. 297 00:38:30,600 --> 00:38:39,750 Many of us who came of age in Peruvian, Indian, that certainly includes me, followed our first prime minister in our state of bemuse, 298 00:38:39,750 --> 00:38:46,410 suspicion and even hostility towards the anthropomorphic, the credulous and the idolatrous. 299 00:38:46,410 --> 00:38:56,190 And in our efforts to estrange ourselves from these in our own abstracted visions of a secular, democratic, socialist India. 300 00:38:56,190 --> 00:39:02,070 If historians are the paradigmatic narrators of such a secular socialist nation, 301 00:39:02,070 --> 00:39:08,850 no wonder then that the histories that we are trying to write fends off the agency of the Godly 302 00:39:08,850 --> 00:39:15,720 and the more than the human orifice translated into the prosaic language of social science, 303 00:39:15,720 --> 00:39:18,660 as I have already noted. 304 00:39:18,660 --> 00:39:28,950 And yet, paradoxically, it is by becoming a professional academic that I've had to contend with and cohabit with some of these wondrous beings, 305 00:39:28,950 --> 00:39:39,180 the Northern European and citizen or secular historian would naturally wish for a court press themselves upon me in ever proliferating ways. 306 00:39:39,180 --> 00:39:41,550 The philosopher of science, Bruno La Tour, 307 00:39:41,550 --> 00:39:50,430 has most insistently reminded us that we live in times in which we are witness to a fabulous population of new images, 308 00:39:50,430 --> 00:40:01,370 fresh icons, rejuvenated mediators, greater flows of media, more powerful ideas, stronger ideals. 309 00:40:01,370 --> 00:40:08,150 These modern goddesses who have entered my professional life are such strong ridi idols 310 00:40:08,150 --> 00:40:15,680 in whose mediated presence I have simultaneously felt both caught up and carried away, 311 00:40:15,680 --> 00:40:22,010 experiencing a pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and a more uncanny feeling 312 00:40:22,010 --> 00:40:30,290 of being disrupted or torn out of my default sensory psychic intellectual disposition. 313 00:40:30,290 --> 00:40:36,710 This, Jane Bennett tells me, is the overall effect of worldly enchantment. 314 00:40:36,710 --> 00:40:42,040 Quote, Enchantment is something that we encounter that hits us. 315 00:40:42,040 --> 00:40:48,080 But it is also comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies. 316 00:40:48,080 --> 00:40:55,580 Such a comportment, she argues, enables us to develop an affective attachment to this world. 317 00:40:55,580 --> 00:41:06,410 It is an ethical aspiration, indeed critical obligation, which requires bodily movements and space mobilisations of heat and energy, 318 00:41:06,410 --> 00:41:14,120 a series of choreographed gestures, a distinctive assemblage of affective propulsion. 319 00:41:14,120 --> 00:41:24,610 It is a comportment that prohibits us from slipping into the banal and the humdrum or worse lapsing into indifference and complacency, 320 00:41:24,610 --> 00:41:31,520 refusing to heed the need for secular salvation or calls for social justice. 321 00:41:31,520 --> 00:41:38,450 In Bennett's words, quote, The wager is that some small but irreducible extent, 322 00:41:38,450 --> 00:41:45,530 one must be enamoured with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order 323 00:41:45,530 --> 00:41:54,410 to be capable of donating some of one's scarce mortal resources to the service of others. 324 00:41:54,410 --> 00:42:07,710 End quote. And so I have come to believe that history writing itself can and should be a deliberate strategy for such effective propulsion or ethical, 325 00:42:07,710 --> 00:42:16,410 worldly enchantment, of which no one, however hard-bitten she or he may be, need feel ashamed, quote, 326 00:42:16,410 --> 00:42:26,120 All we need to do is to immerse yourself in the epiphanies of form taking place before our eyes and quote. 327 00:42:26,120 --> 00:42:30,140 In this call to immerse myself in the epiphany of form, 328 00:42:30,140 --> 00:42:37,760 I hear the hail of the mother goddess who over the long course of the subcontinent's history originating 329 00:42:37,760 --> 00:42:45,710 in the valley of the Indus in the third millennium B.C. has been something of a scandal herself, 330 00:42:45,710 --> 00:42:56,420 fierce, volatile, unpredictable, even becoming a weapon in the hands of illiberal forces, as we have seen with the travails of Emma Forseen, 331 00:42:56,420 --> 00:43:05,780 but also playful, mischievous, compassionate and alert to the pleas of the disenfranchised, the marginal and the subaltern. 332 00:43:05,780 --> 00:43:15,770 As we have seen in the project of children of not least my entanglements with these diverse goddesses have taught me to seriously question 333 00:43:15,770 --> 00:43:26,640 my opening premise cute by influential social theory that modernity ushers in the inevitable and necessary disenchantment of the world. 334 00:43:26,640 --> 00:43:33,360 Instead, what I have learnt to recognise is that the enchanted figure of the goddess in all its complexity 335 00:43:33,360 --> 00:43:39,330 contends with rivalling regimes of enchantment with their own proclivities and passions, 336 00:43:39,330 --> 00:43:50,550 including those produced by being engaged in the work of worldly historical scholarship, which, too, has frequently held me spellbound and enthralled, 337 00:43:50,550 --> 00:44:01,510 prohibiting me from lapsing into indifference, holding out the promise of secular salvation in the service of others. 338 00:44:01,510 --> 00:44:13,660 As I bring my talk to a close, I cannot but help observing that just when I thought I was done with Goddess's, I have been proven wrong yet again. 339 00:44:13,660 --> 00:44:24,040 As the world came to a standstill literally in the early months of 2020 with the arrival of covid-19 in our midst. 340 00:44:24,040 --> 00:44:35,810 In India, the spread of the novel coronavirus also precipitated the arrival of a new goddess in the midst of its citizenry, or to be more accurate. 341 00:44:35,810 --> 00:44:40,810 She's the adaptation of a recent goddess to the current moment as mother, 342 00:44:40,810 --> 00:44:48,550 India takes on a completely new job as the slayer of disease and a protector against a pandemic. 343 00:44:48,550 --> 00:44:51,880 My colleague and friend Ravinder called and I went off. 344 00:44:51,880 --> 00:45:00,550 We had to on a hot pursuit of this new avatar in a paper we recently published from which I'm sharing some of these images on the slide. 345 00:45:00,550 --> 00:45:09,880 Her iconography, as you can tell, is still very unstable, with elements borrowed from the old, the near new and the entirely novel. 346 00:45:09,880 --> 00:45:20,140 As with her prototype, the new goddess too has a votaries were all too willing to appropriate for an illiberal Hindu nationalist cause, 347 00:45:20,140 --> 00:45:25,090 particularly dangerous at a time when the party in power is apparently battling. 348 00:45:25,090 --> 00:45:36,040 The virus is also a Hindu nationalist, but she has also drawn our attention to the role of the essential worker in hospitals and streets. 349 00:45:36,040 --> 00:45:44,560 Most importantly, in striking contrast to the ancestral disease, the Dave Davies of the Indian landscape. 350 00:45:44,560 --> 00:45:52,680 The new goddess is not the defaecation of covid-19, but a warrior summoned to destroy the disease. 351 00:45:52,680 --> 00:45:58,770 So I said, draw my presentation to applause, I leave you with some of these images amongst several others, 352 00:45:58,770 --> 00:46:05,220 that may well be harbingers of more to come if I have learnt to know my goddesses. 353 00:46:05,220 --> 00:46:09,267 Well, thank you.