1 00:00:00,440 --> 00:00:16,630 It will take a few seconds. Well, good afternoon, everybody. 2 00:00:16,630 --> 00:00:28,900 It's my great pleasure to welcome you to this second meeting of our Oxford South Asian modern South Asia seminars. 3 00:00:28,900 --> 00:00:37,270 Today, again, taking advantage of the willingness of people and scholars across the world to give us talk, 4 00:00:37,270 --> 00:00:46,900 which is a silver lining in the cloud of the pandemic. We extend a very warm welcome to Professor Dilip Menin. 5 00:00:46,900 --> 00:00:56,670 Dilip is Melan professor of Indian Studies and director of the Centre of Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Voters. 6 00:00:56,670 --> 00:01:05,710 And now DeLay cannot delay Condi. I hope that it won't mind my saying this back a very long way together. 7 00:01:05,710 --> 00:01:16,510 Dilip was really one of the very first pioneers with his cultural history in the field, in the field of subalterns, 8 00:01:16,510 --> 00:01:25,210 studies considered in its broad cultural broadest cultural dimensions and with 9 00:01:25,210 --> 00:01:31,570 his his pathbreaking book Cost Nationalism and Communism in South India, 10 00:01:31,570 --> 00:01:42,400 published in 1994. Elipse Perspectives on caste, on caste identity, on Dalit identity, 11 00:01:42,400 --> 00:01:52,630 on untouchability in the colonial era were really tremendously important in showing us what could be done with us. 12 00:01:52,630 --> 00:02:01,260 When a historian was willing to look at all kinds of unusual sources, such as oral histories, 13 00:02:01,260 --> 00:02:11,260 Ballards and and what had hitherto been considered the ephemera of colonial social history. 14 00:02:11,260 --> 00:02:24,430 Since then, Dilip has has continued to work on cost, continue to work on issues of socialism and equality in modern India, and has a whole wealth, 15 00:02:24,430 --> 00:02:34,270 not just of scholarly essays, but also of broader essays addressing important questions of cultural history, literature, theatre and so on. 16 00:02:34,270 --> 00:02:39,040 And it's it's very engaging and impressive. 17 00:02:39,040 --> 00:02:45,970 See now the turn that did its work has taken towards the global. 18 00:02:45,970 --> 00:02:52,060 This is in his most recent capitalisms of global history. 19 00:02:52,060 --> 00:02:58,480 An edited volume with Oxford University Press that came out in February this year. 20 00:02:58,480 --> 00:03:13,250 And we're really does a long overdue job in exploring the diversity of capitalisms across across the globe and across centuries and even millennia. 21 00:03:13,250 --> 00:03:26,260 Labour, really, the differences that are all too often subsumed under some monolithic notion that capitalism is it takes only one particular form. 22 00:03:26,260 --> 00:03:32,560 And what we have to look forward to, I believe, next year is another work of global history, 23 00:03:32,560 --> 00:03:37,240 another volume bringing together foremost scholars in the field. 24 00:03:37,240 --> 00:03:42,640 Concepts from the Global South do arc, which is due out with Rutledge, 25 00:03:42,640 --> 00:03:49,860 in which Dilip and his colleagues and I have to say I haven't read this, but I look forward to it read keenly. 26 00:03:49,860 --> 00:04:06,580 Philip and his colleagues really draw out the nuances of a whole range of culturally critical words in languages from across the global south. 27 00:04:06,580 --> 00:04:16,540 And that very careful focus on terms, on their nuances, on their changing forms over time, their cultural ramifications. 28 00:04:16,540 --> 00:04:28,310 I think we can anticipate an absolute feast and a real expansion of our understanding of the interface between politics, language and culture. 29 00:04:28,310 --> 00:04:36,270 Now, today, appropriately, and we're most grateful to do it for the arts during our call. 30 00:04:36,270 --> 00:04:40,250 The TV available to talk to us today most appropriately. 31 00:04:40,250 --> 00:04:53,690 We are going to hear about another pandemic. Still, its title for today is Pandemic as events thinking modern Indian Society Through a crisis did it. 32 00:04:53,690 --> 00:04:56,990 Please let me hand over to you. Thank you. 33 00:04:56,990 --> 00:05:02,000 Thank you very much, Polly. And thank you, Andrea. Thank you for inviting me to old hunting grounds, 34 00:05:02,000 --> 00:05:07,310 even though as a virtual presence and one of the advantages of knowing the person chairing the 35 00:05:07,310 --> 00:05:11,520 session for a very long time is that they're extremely flattering things to say about you. 36 00:05:11,520 --> 00:05:20,420 You're not bemused by your presence on the screen. So what I'm going to do today is actually not be so much on my work as an historian, 37 00:05:20,420 --> 00:05:25,490 but on my work as an inhabitant of the universe in a time of crisis. 38 00:05:25,490 --> 00:05:29,780 Because one of the things I think all of us have been doing besides doing scrolling that is, 39 00:05:29,780 --> 00:05:39,770 is to try and be aware of what this pandemic is doing in terms of revealing to us the structures of society, 40 00:05:39,770 --> 00:05:45,590 revealing to us certain existing prejudices, certain political fault lines and so on, 41 00:05:45,590 --> 00:05:55,730 and also requiring us to think about our task as historians writing from a movement which I suppose is unparalleled in our lifetimes. 42 00:05:55,730 --> 00:06:06,320 None of us has experienced lockdown before where we were forcibly confined to our homes in a form of house arrest, 43 00:06:06,320 --> 00:06:13,880 though that would be per putting too much weight on something that didn't demand too much political dissidents from us. 44 00:06:13,880 --> 00:06:23,610 But this whole idea of being in the world as the entire world has become knit together by a common experience of lockdown 45 00:06:23,610 --> 00:06:34,310 is something that tells us that is not possible anymore to study the word from our respective wanted standpoints, 46 00:06:34,310 --> 00:06:42,980 whether we come from a particular village, a particular caste, a particular nation, but to think more globally about what unites us as human beings. 47 00:06:42,980 --> 00:06:48,080 And certainly this follows clues on the heels of the larger political movement 48 00:06:48,080 --> 00:06:54,040 that is happening where we are beginning to look at the answer proceeding. We are beginning to look at human animal relations. 49 00:06:54,040 --> 00:07:04,740 We are beginning to think about global warming, multiple conjunct chairs in which humanity is right now what rich Corbitt as yet another phenomenon. 50 00:07:04,740 --> 00:07:10,430 So one of the things that I think I want to begin with is the fact that conjuncture just 51 00:07:10,430 --> 00:07:18,860 like these revealed to the functioning of society or the dysfunctional nature of societies, 52 00:07:18,860 --> 00:07:21,500 showing US hierarchy is showing US inequality, 53 00:07:21,500 --> 00:07:32,390 showing us the inability of government and civil society to come to terms with certain forms of disorganisation that have set in. 54 00:07:32,390 --> 00:07:37,310 And I am reminded in many senses of the movement fairly early on in my youth, 55 00:07:37,310 --> 00:07:45,740 when some of you may remember the first volumes of Oulton studies came out in nineteen eighty two and I'm off that generation, 56 00:07:45,740 --> 00:07:50,240 which was hugely influenced and decided not to do the national pastime of writing. 57 00:07:50,240 --> 00:07:58,340 The Civil Service examination decided to do history much to the misfortune of the discipline the civilian studies came out. 58 00:07:58,340 --> 00:08:05,000 And then in 1984, two years after the first volume, you had the assassination of Mrs. Indira Gandhi, 59 00:08:05,000 --> 00:08:12,800 which was followed by the large scale massacres of Sikhs, which at that time started the Indian conscience. 60 00:08:12,800 --> 00:08:22,160 Unfortunately, this has become a feature. Earlier this year, we saw the programmes in Delhi carried out against Muslims by the Bharatiya Janata Party. 61 00:08:22,160 --> 00:08:25,460 But to go back to 1984 when this happened, 62 00:08:25,460 --> 00:08:35,210 it became evident that much of the exaltation of these spontaneous uprisings of the masses needed to be understood with a clear eye. 63 00:08:35,210 --> 00:08:40,100 And it was professor summit scholar who spoke to us in Delhi at that point and said, 64 00:08:40,100 --> 00:08:49,450 how do we exactly understand civilian agency when it comes to us in a hugely complicated we such as this, 65 00:08:49,450 --> 00:08:58,640 where we are thinking about rivalries of class, caste, political contingencies, ethnicity and so on and so forth. 66 00:08:58,640 --> 00:09:01,670 So similarly, when we think about this conjunction of Cawood, 67 00:09:01,670 --> 00:09:08,210 we need to be aware of the forms of agency that are being accelerated, are being accentuated, 68 00:09:08,210 --> 00:09:20,990 and we need to think about these and different things about the theoretical intervention by the and old school where a sort of you may be familiar. 69 00:09:20,990 --> 00:09:27,580 There was a distinction made between heuristically three kinds of time, the time of the Loom Jouvet. 70 00:09:27,580 --> 00:09:31,880 Geological time. The question of climate. 71 00:09:31,880 --> 00:09:40,570 A whole set of historical circumstances would needed to be explained in terms of millennia. 72 00:09:40,570 --> 00:09:48,460 Also the history of events which are shorter, but which. So something like the French Revolution, we did mark a distinct conjuncture. 73 00:09:48,460 --> 00:10:01,000 I mean, a distinct break from a certain past. And you also have these Quinn junctures within which certain fault lines within society were revealed. 74 00:10:01,000 --> 00:10:10,030 So between the long juday, the history of events and the conjuncture is the conjuncture comes to us as a revolutionary movement in many senses. 75 00:10:10,030 --> 00:10:13,810 And we can think about many such in Indian history. 76 00:10:13,810 --> 00:10:23,710 Certainly the 1984 massacre was seen as one such departure where a certain idea of India came into question and the killing of minorities surfaced. 77 00:10:23,710 --> 00:10:33,730 Many memories of the partition surfaced in 1984. People started speaking about the inversion of 1948 and 1984, for example. 78 00:10:33,730 --> 00:10:39,310 And we have in 1992, the BARBREE Masjid event, which, you know, 79 00:10:39,310 --> 00:10:45,100 the destruction of the BARBREE mustered by India fundamentalist, which again called into question the whole paradigm. 80 00:10:45,100 --> 00:10:50,250 But what was interesting about this point is that about the onset of cougar is 81 00:10:50,250 --> 00:10:57,010 that people are suddenly looking back 100 years to the 1918 and the Spanish flu. 82 00:10:57,010 --> 00:11:01,900 And this is something that was an event that had been more or less forgotten. 83 00:11:01,900 --> 00:11:08,380 I mean, not many people remember the Spanish flu except people who had been alive at that time, perhaps. 84 00:11:08,380 --> 00:11:11,440 I mean, I doubt whether such ancient individuals exist, 85 00:11:11,440 --> 00:11:19,390 but these Spanish flu became the kind of resonant moment, the moment that twinned with our present. 86 00:11:19,390 --> 00:11:29,500 And if one looks back to the work that was done on the Spanish flu, one realises that the onset of the Spanish flu was global. 87 00:11:29,500 --> 00:11:37,420 It followed a certain crisis, the First World War. But it also sparked off particular crisis within empires. 88 00:11:37,420 --> 00:11:45,070 So the British Empire, for instance, in India, you know, several tens of millions of people died. 89 00:11:45,070 --> 00:11:53,980 And it is interesting how the colonial government had been less than interventionist in the 1918 Spanish flu, whether it was the fatigue of war, 90 00:11:53,980 --> 00:12:00,990 whether it was the fact that the British government and India had burned the tents during the 1896 cholera epidemic, 91 00:12:00,990 --> 00:12:10,090 Meditative adopted an extremely interventionist approach which was seen by many need to each side as kind of being an attack on Indian society. 92 00:12:10,090 --> 00:12:14,400 And its cultural norms led to the first political assassination in India. 93 00:12:14,400 --> 00:12:22,420 WG ran the play commissioner and were named by two prime Inuit's who felt that Indian culture was under threat. 94 00:12:22,420 --> 00:12:34,180 But this conjuncture of cool it brought back many of those memories brought back the idea of a period when the state kind of abandoned its rule, 95 00:12:34,180 --> 00:12:38,800 as it were, in 1918. The scale of deaths is very high. 96 00:12:38,800 --> 00:12:46,770 Certainly we're nowhere close to that number, but we are talking about a freeing that is happening of society. 97 00:12:46,770 --> 00:12:55,670 And in David Arnold's wonderful essay, he speaks about a very, very poignant instances, like the famous board, 98 00:12:55,670 --> 00:13:01,150 your counterpart in The Rala, writing about how almost his entire family was decimated. 99 00:13:01,150 --> 00:13:06,250 Looking at the River Ganges and seeing it flowing with bodies because bodies could not be cremated. 100 00:13:06,250 --> 00:13:12,340 People are scared about handling bodies which were afflicted with the flu. 101 00:13:12,340 --> 00:13:23,380 Are the famous tiger hunter and conservationist Jim Colvert spoke about how man eating became a phenomenon in the foothills of the Himalayas. 102 00:13:23,380 --> 00:13:29,830 As bodies are abandoned and tigers developed a taste for human flesh and so on and so forth. 103 00:13:29,830 --> 00:13:42,490 So in one sense, what these events, whether it's 1918 or this pandemic, do for us is to move us away from the idea of a homogeneous, empty time. 104 00:13:42,490 --> 00:13:45,310 This is actually, you know, a phrase of any resonant, 105 00:13:45,310 --> 00:13:54,760 plangent phrase from Walter Benjamin's essay on the philosophy of history and his idea that historians should be critiquing this idea homogeneous, 106 00:13:54,760 --> 00:14:02,290 empty time. That indeed, history is about the flash that connects us to the past, 107 00:14:02,290 --> 00:14:11,870 that we in our present moment look back from a moment of danger to a moment in the past in order to see what that moment reveals to us. 108 00:14:11,870 --> 00:14:17,500 And in one sense, that is exactly what is happening right now in the middle of the pandemic, 109 00:14:17,500 --> 00:14:27,130 that this conjuncture has summoned up historical memories, that there are ways in which we are thinking about these global connexions of fresh. 110 00:14:27,130 --> 00:14:34,610 A wonderful essays on, for example, the Treaty of Versailles, for example, Treaty of Versailles, 111 00:14:34,610 --> 00:14:42,020 which the harsh terms of which many have argued have led to the rise of Nazis in Germany. 112 00:14:42,020 --> 00:14:49,070 And, of course, this this wonderful essay which speaks about how Woodrow Wilson was suffering from the Spanish flu enfeebled by it. 113 00:14:49,070 --> 00:14:51,710 He couldn't withstand the Manley's George Clemenceau, 114 00:14:51,710 --> 00:15:01,080 who was insisting that harsh terms be levied against their France's rival, Germany, and that Woodrow Wilson caved in. 115 00:15:01,080 --> 00:15:06,140 And so in that sense, the Spanish flu was responsible for the rise of Naziism, Hitler and so on. 116 00:15:06,140 --> 00:15:13,580 So you find a lot of these historical arguments that are circulating which are concerned with the rupture of homogeneous, empty time. 117 00:15:13,580 --> 00:15:21,830 They're reaching back to moments in the past to try and understand these conjuncture is that we are living in. 118 00:15:21,830 --> 00:15:31,310 So if you are to think about India in particular, one of the things that is clear is that we are at a moment where we have to think globally. 119 00:15:31,310 --> 00:15:40,010 So regardless whether really we're thinking about both scenario, we're thinking about putting we are thinking about Trump, we think about Erdogan. 120 00:15:40,010 --> 00:15:45,210 We're thinking of that in the movie. We are thinking about forms of authoritarian populism, 121 00:15:45,210 --> 00:15:57,510 which have emerged as a kind of threat to the forms of democracy that had been set in place from the post Second World War era. 122 00:15:57,510 --> 00:16:07,660 And what we have now is a kind of toxic mix of a performative populism, by which I mean that governments are less about pastorale forms of care. 123 00:16:07,660 --> 00:16:14,490 And when you think about the welfare state, we think about Social Security, we think about medical insurance. 124 00:16:14,490 --> 00:16:21,810 We think about the fraying of the NHS in Britain. We think about the freeing of the entire public health system in China. 125 00:16:21,810 --> 00:16:25,320 We think about the attack on Obama care in the United States, 126 00:16:25,320 --> 00:16:34,290 where this performative populism is about the presentation of the leader as the person who exemplifies a popular will. 127 00:16:34,290 --> 00:16:38,940 And there has been also a huge deployment to social media. 128 00:16:38,940 --> 00:16:51,360 Social media determines what we know. And the idea of the that we live in a world of invented facts, that we live with half truths surround us, 129 00:16:51,360 --> 00:17:00,150 that very often what triggers political and social action and indeed civil society is based on a mixture of fact and fiction. 130 00:17:00,150 --> 00:17:06,030 And increasingly, the third feature is that we've seen attacks against earlier paradigms. 131 00:17:06,030 --> 00:17:15,870 So whether it is notions of secularism, of liberal societies which are multicultural and accepting of racial and religious differences. 132 00:17:15,870 --> 00:17:25,590 In India, you've seen the attack on Nehru organism, on liberal democracy, on certainly on secularism, forms of social egalitarianism. 133 00:17:25,590 --> 00:17:31,470 But when we look at all of this, there is a way in which we have to think beyond the moment. 134 00:17:31,470 --> 00:17:40,410 And certainly something like the pandemic has required us to ask, is this something that is astonishingly new? 135 00:17:40,410 --> 00:17:48,960 Is this something that is the has become evident and has surfaced in the last two, three years? 136 00:17:48,960 --> 00:17:59,790 And then if you look at Indian history and we think about the ways in which Narendra Modi has presented himself in many senses as a monarch, 137 00:17:59,790 --> 00:18:07,470 also as it is Zelig like character, where he has inserted himself into every previous movement in Indian history 138 00:18:07,470 --> 00:18:12,690 so that the RSS has is seen as playing a role in the independence movement, 139 00:18:12,690 --> 00:18:21,570 which did not enter. Modi has shown himself sitting at the church car very much like Marmar Gandhi and 140 00:18:21,570 --> 00:18:28,350 spitting at the kind of speed that Henry Ford would have appreciated the Chark has. 141 00:18:28,350 --> 00:18:31,590 You noticed a slower, reflective kind of weaving. 142 00:18:31,590 --> 00:18:40,440 So this Zelig like insertion into history, which also is about facing forms of history where history is himself. 143 00:18:40,440 --> 00:18:46,770 All of these. So one begins to ask, this is something that is tremendously new. 144 00:18:46,770 --> 00:18:55,260 And thinking back to the lineages of this authoritarian populism, one can perhaps go back to the forms of mobilisation, 145 00:18:55,260 --> 00:18:59,820 Gandhian mobilisation, which were the politics of exemplary city, 146 00:18:59,820 --> 00:19:05,010 because Gandhi also embodied an authoritarian populism of a certain kind where 147 00:19:05,010 --> 00:19:11,850 it was Gandhi worse as he became the sole spokesperson of Indian nationalism. 148 00:19:11,850 --> 00:19:17,730 And if you think about the writing of Indian nationalism or the writing of national assistance post independence, 149 00:19:17,730 --> 00:19:25,470 what we had was Gandhi at the peak and a whole lot of people who fell by the wayside like Ambedkar, Bu, Sam and Roy and so on and so forth. 150 00:19:25,470 --> 00:19:31,950 People who contended against that, Gandhi, Invision, really Gandhi embodied the people. 151 00:19:31,950 --> 00:19:37,200 He was Christlike on the cross. He died for the sins of India, so to speak. 152 00:19:37,200 --> 00:19:42,900 And so that kind of authoritarian populism which then gained a successor in Nehru. 153 00:19:42,900 --> 00:19:52,290 And I've written about this recently in an article on the emergency where I look at the foremost satirical journal of independent India, 154 00:19:52,290 --> 00:19:59,790 founded in 1949, Chanko weekly, where every page had Nehru writ large it. 155 00:19:59,790 --> 00:20:07,200 So at the same time as Nehru was made the object of satire, gentle satire, no doubt. 156 00:20:07,200 --> 00:20:17,060 He also came to stand in for India. And interestingly enough, Nehru tells Shankar, Don't spare me Shankar. 157 00:20:17,060 --> 00:20:21,530 He says there Shankar is satirical under the direction. 158 00:20:21,530 --> 00:20:30,210 Off the authoritarian populist, so to speak, to particularly the spirit of Kuwait and the kind of tightening there, 159 00:20:30,210 --> 00:20:38,910 certain forms of control and certain forms of responsibility by the state leads us to think back about the genealogy. 160 00:20:38,910 --> 00:20:46,470 This is not to say that we need to work with a teleology, that there isn't a line that leads us from Gandhi to move. 161 00:20:46,470 --> 00:20:52,560 But it also needs us to be more thoughtful about the present. 162 00:20:52,560 --> 00:21:01,320 Think about the lineages of the present. Think about the kind of forms of political society, political visions that existed in the past, 163 00:21:01,320 --> 00:21:08,880 which are possibly created and coloured the forms of politics we have now. 164 00:21:08,880 --> 00:21:15,390 The Economist, which I never thought I would be quoting at any point in my life, approvingly or otherwise, 165 00:21:15,390 --> 00:21:21,070 has this wonderful phrase called farm democracy or democracy in the time of pandemics. 166 00:21:21,070 --> 00:21:27,500 And what and what this phrase captures for us is that regardless of where we look right now, 167 00:21:27,500 --> 00:21:36,870 it's India, Brazil, US, etc., that democracy has begun to function in particular forms. 168 00:21:36,870 --> 00:21:46,840 Embodying. Authoritarian at embodying an authoritarian streak where the stifling of dissent, 169 00:21:46,840 --> 00:21:54,670 the stifling of any kind of difference from the attempt to make a national paradigm are treated with violence. 170 00:21:54,670 --> 00:22:02,200 So you see this happening in the US where a large number of Trump supporters have given up the mosque are questioning 171 00:22:02,200 --> 00:22:10,590 the very foundations of racial equality as much as common sense in terms of occupying public space in India. 172 00:22:10,590 --> 00:22:21,120 We've seen the stifling of dissent because just prior to the onset of Gooby, we had that huge explosion of civil dissent. 173 00:22:21,120 --> 00:22:25,210 You know, we had the city against the Citizenship Amendment Act. 174 00:22:25,210 --> 00:22:33,640 You have the emergence of Shaheen Bug in Delhi, where large numbers of them in support began to speak for democracy. 175 00:22:33,640 --> 00:22:37,480 And then Shaheen Bug was replicated all over India very recently. 176 00:22:37,480 --> 00:22:45,640 The Supreme Court has passed a judgement saying that a phenomenon like Shaheen Bug has to be governed by a notion of time, 177 00:22:45,640 --> 00:22:52,670 that it cannot continue, that this cannot be a protest without end, that protests have to be temporarily bound. 178 00:22:52,670 --> 00:23:00,530 Now, needless to that, the circumstances that necessitated the creation of a Shaheen bank haven't vanished. 179 00:23:00,530 --> 00:23:08,840 Thanks. Questions of who is a citizen of India still, Ataman? The question of who is not a citizen are being enacted in front of our eyes. 180 00:23:08,840 --> 00:23:14,440 And so what you see in this period of democracy is, one, the stifling of dissent. 181 00:23:14,440 --> 00:23:20,560 There is a way in which the earlier upsurge of activity is more or less come to an end, 182 00:23:20,560 --> 00:23:24,880 largely because of social distancing, lockdown and so on and so forth. 183 00:23:24,880 --> 00:23:32,980 But there is an ongoing attack on one intellectual bastions like General Electric University. 184 00:23:32,980 --> 00:23:39,160 There is also the use of the, ironically, a law introduced by the previous government, 185 00:23:39,160 --> 00:23:46,810 the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and Cubitt has become the time to round up dissent. 186 00:23:46,810 --> 00:23:56,080 So we have seen over a period of time the arrest of eminent poets and activists like whatever we have seen. 187 00:23:56,080 --> 00:24:07,140 The former editor of GBW, Gautam Moloch, has been arrested. The Dalit intellectual and thinker on until 10 days in jail. 188 00:24:07,140 --> 00:24:11,830 S.G. and say that I was a lecturer at Yale University, honeybun, we could go on. 189 00:24:11,830 --> 00:24:23,740 I mean, a lot of you are familiar if you've been reading the newspapers about how dissent is being slowly curtailed, under cover off lockdown. 190 00:24:23,740 --> 00:24:33,160 And we are also seeing the creation of a new archive. And this is something that is possibly can and what can be called an archive of absurdity. 191 00:24:33,160 --> 00:24:41,370 Because if you think about the case that was filed against the citizenship amendment and the activists opposing the Citizenship Amendment Act, 192 00:24:41,370 --> 00:24:52,900 it was seventeen thousand five hundred pages of documents which took on the programme that happened earlier this year against Muslims in Delhi. 193 00:24:52,900 --> 00:24:57,640 And it is only those who are protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act will be nameless, 194 00:24:57,640 --> 00:25:03,100 not those who call for violence against Muslims and so on. Another absurd archive. 195 00:25:03,100 --> 00:25:07,220 You have my colleague, the student leader from JNU, 196 00:25:07,220 --> 00:25:15,580 who was asked to read one point one million pages of documents in a week in order to defend himself. 197 00:25:15,580 --> 00:25:24,040 So the band Democracy has created a form of excess and excess of documentation, 198 00:25:24,040 --> 00:25:31,870 an excess of documentation which records every form of political expression as dissent. 199 00:25:31,870 --> 00:25:38,290 So you have there is no gradation as to the difference between Brother Rao and a lot of Khaleed. 200 00:25:38,290 --> 00:25:51,400 There is a kind of landscape that has been created when it if anyone appearing to stand against the government can be subjected to the 201 00:25:51,400 --> 00:26:01,580 most extreme forms of suppression and the creation of this archive of documents that then can be used to bang them on the head with. 202 00:26:01,580 --> 00:26:08,240 And those of you, again, have been who have been following the news, knew that at the heart of this, 203 00:26:08,240 --> 00:26:17,240 at the heart of this is the violence that happened in 2018 at Pima County now where the celebrated large 204 00:26:17,240 --> 00:26:25,240 numbers of Dalitz gathered to celebrate a formal victory in the colonial period and against them, 205 00:26:25,240 --> 00:26:30,080 Morato US. And there was a huge attack on them. Large numbers of adults were killed. 206 00:26:30,080 --> 00:26:34,960 The violence was seen as being orchestrated by these very figures who are now being arrested. 207 00:26:34,960 --> 00:26:41,780 So be being it now has become a kind of catchall phrase for to arrest and to suppress dissent. 208 00:26:41,780 --> 00:26:45,830 And we have an increasing form of surveillance that is coming into operation. 209 00:26:45,830 --> 00:26:49,490 Those of you who are familiar again, and I've been following the news, 210 00:26:49,490 --> 00:26:56,260 know that the gunman restraints do something called the AHTO app, the health app, which would be on your phone. 211 00:26:56,260 --> 00:27:01,910 What it basically meant that it would track your movements wherever you were, whatever you were doing. 212 00:27:01,910 --> 00:27:07,250 Large numbers of people, of course, raise the issue of privacy, as they did earlier with the outside. 213 00:27:07,250 --> 00:27:19,220 But the app was again came to be at the heart of this idea of a kind of game, to borrow a phrase from the economist of the current octagons. 214 00:27:19,220 --> 00:27:25,730 Right. That in the time of Corona, Corona, that's a kind of panopticon that the Gonnerman tests state to create, 215 00:27:25,730 --> 00:27:34,190 which tries to enact a form of surveillance against every citizen. 216 00:27:34,190 --> 00:27:39,820 So what is happening to democracy at this point is that democracy is not built. 217 00:27:39,820 --> 00:27:45,040 It's not premised anymore on the idea of civil society and dissent, 218 00:27:45,040 --> 00:27:51,650 which is based on this performative authoritarian populism, which is also based on a sidelining of parliament. 219 00:27:51,650 --> 00:27:57,950 All of this becomes possible because of the lockdown and because of your ability 220 00:27:57,950 --> 00:28:04,190 of the government in the interests of the larger interest of hell than of fear, 221 00:28:04,190 --> 00:28:07,820 of contagion and so on, to contain the numbers of people on the street, 222 00:28:07,820 --> 00:28:13,730 contain protests on the streets so that when you had the recent passing of the Farm Act, 223 00:28:13,730 --> 00:28:17,690 which basically removes the minimum support price for farmers, 224 00:28:17,690 --> 00:28:25,220 grants huge authority to corporates to not only determine the trajectory of agricultural production, 225 00:28:25,220 --> 00:28:31,190 but also to gain control over the little farms that exist and on farmers decisions. 226 00:28:31,190 --> 00:28:37,980 The Farm Act was passed in a matter of. A few days without any discussion whatsoever. 227 00:28:37,980 --> 00:28:43,500 So we have to think about it. The authoritarian populism and democracy. 228 00:28:43,500 --> 00:28:48,860 The other question that we need to think about, which is very crucial, is the fact that. 229 00:28:48,860 --> 00:28:55,180 If India is largely and increasingly it is becoming evident, it's a hierarchical, 230 00:28:55,180 --> 00:29:03,280 inegalitarian and violent society which imagines itself through who it inflicts violence on, 231 00:29:03,280 --> 00:29:08,890 so be upon the lynchings of Muslims who have had the killings of phthalates. 232 00:29:08,890 --> 00:29:13,450 The recent hottest case, Theroux's the rule of law to the winds. 233 00:29:13,450 --> 00:29:27,430 We've had the body of a young girl who was raped, burned by the police even before any form of investigation could be launched. 234 00:29:27,430 --> 00:29:32,260 I'm sorry, I'm just getting various things popping up on my screen. Yes. Here I it back again. 235 00:29:32,260 --> 00:29:40,590 So the question here is that this whole idea of who belongs to the nation was raised. 236 00:29:40,590 --> 00:29:45,590 First by the Citizenship Amendment Act, by the. 237 00:29:45,590 --> 00:29:52,820 Government saying that those who came from outside India, particularly countries like Bangladesh, 238 00:29:52,820 --> 00:29:56,570 Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, could not be deemed to be citizens of India. 239 00:29:56,570 --> 00:30:02,780 Very clear. This was a kind of dog whistle to the Hindu constituency about keeping out the Muslims. 240 00:30:02,780 --> 00:30:08,540 But it is also clear that it's not only those who come from outside, but those who live within, who are being marginalised. 241 00:30:08,540 --> 00:30:17,660 And we are seeing increasingly under Cubitt forms of violence that are increasing rule of law that is being abandoned. 242 00:30:17,660 --> 00:30:24,320 And the number of cases of attacks on Dalitz and Muslims has actually spiked in this period. 243 00:30:24,320 --> 00:30:29,660 And the recent statistics as to the numbers of Dalitz and Muslims in prison, 244 00:30:29,660 --> 00:30:40,650 not alarming because there is a hugely disproportionate to their actual numbers in the population, not into this kind of. 245 00:30:40,650 --> 00:30:50,130 Field, where if the Citizenship Amendment Act was about defining who did not belong in terms of the insider and the outsider. 246 00:30:50,130 --> 00:30:56,460 The whole issue of the Dalit and Muslim within the country has become that of the insider outsider. 247 00:30:56,460 --> 00:31:01,190 Somebody who is within society but who is permanently on the margin. 248 00:31:01,190 --> 00:31:11,430 So society. And if one thinks about the kind of work that unentitled them they had been has been writing since his book on the care Longy murders, 249 00:31:11,430 --> 00:31:15,090 for example, India's hidden apartheid, as he calls it. 250 00:31:15,090 --> 00:31:24,150 And the fact that there has been this consistent low grade fever since 1947 of the impunity with which Dalitz had been killed, 251 00:31:24,150 --> 00:31:34,530 Dalit villagers have been torched, Dalit women have been raped. All of these are in some sense acquiring more and more frequency and increasingly 252 00:31:34,530 --> 00:31:40,840 also finding more and more prominence so that there is a whole generation undercook. 253 00:31:40,840 --> 00:31:45,660 It was also rekeying activists. Now, it's not as if this did not exist. 254 00:31:45,660 --> 00:31:49,620 You think about the Kilbane mining massacre, massacre of nineteen sixty eight. 255 00:31:49,620 --> 00:31:53,760 We are actually at 41. Dalitz burned alive in their village. 256 00:31:53,760 --> 00:31:58,590 But there were there was a way in which all of this was kept under the radar in secular India, 257 00:31:58,590 --> 00:32:03,120 where religious violence was seen as more important than violence against Dalit. 258 00:32:03,120 --> 00:32:11,560 But undercover, I think not only are the incidents of violence growing, the perception of violence is growing as well. 259 00:32:11,560 --> 00:32:18,000 And this is an important fact that we need to take into account that the recent High Court, Allahabad High Court judgement, 260 00:32:18,000 --> 00:32:22,050 we tend to assume that the state of with their produce is beyond redemption, 261 00:32:22,050 --> 00:32:29,670 controlled entirely by the chief minister, RJ Wisht, who calls himself first saw me something or the other. 262 00:32:29,670 --> 00:32:36,630 I forget his name. So Jeb Bush has unleashed a reign of terror over the alarm about high court has said 263 00:32:36,630 --> 00:32:42,030 that the actions of the police and burning the rape victim were illegal right now. 264 00:32:42,030 --> 00:32:54,230 So you find this come to balance that is slowly emerging as the courts are beginning to step in and that balance of power that we speak about. 265 00:32:54,230 --> 00:33:00,680 Is required has been required to become more active, a public conscience has been aroused, 266 00:33:00,680 --> 00:33:13,480 and so this conjuncture is something that sees both the kind of exacerbation of state authoritarianism, 267 00:33:13,480 --> 00:33:18,310 but is also seeing a rising swell of public dissent and of this. 268 00:33:18,310 --> 00:33:29,240 And they are hopeful to be able to see where this really go, because as of now, there isn't a significant opposition to the prime minister Modi. 269 00:33:29,240 --> 00:33:33,200 So this question of the untouchable, the question of the Dalit, 270 00:33:33,200 --> 00:33:38,900 the question of the Dalit at the heart of India is something that has increasingly begun to surface. 271 00:33:38,900 --> 00:33:45,170 And here again, if one thinks about what is happening in the United States is interesting and the other democracy, 272 00:33:45,170 --> 00:33:51,620 and we call ourselves the world's most populous democracy, America calls into the world's oldest democracy and so on. 273 00:33:51,620 --> 00:34:02,650 And so for the various ways in which countries which are governed by authoritarian populist claim the title of Democrats and a democracy. 274 00:34:02,650 --> 00:34:08,820 The killing of Flight George earlier this year. 275 00:34:08,820 --> 00:34:15,250 Rejuvenated the Black Lives Matter movement. And I think. 276 00:34:15,250 --> 00:34:25,100 There is a significant reason purpose. Because his last words like that of many other black men killed at the hands of policemen in the United States. 277 00:34:25,100 --> 00:34:28,940 His last words were, I could not. 278 00:34:28,940 --> 00:34:40,700 I cannot breathe. And this struck a chord with a kind of illness and the kind of disease that the corona virus has inflicted on humanity. 279 00:34:40,700 --> 00:34:48,400 It attacks the respiratory system. So this. Became a metaphor almost as I cannot breathe. 280 00:34:48,400 --> 00:34:56,290 Is the condition of human civilisation right now. And George Floyds last words touched a chord somewhere. 281 00:34:56,290 --> 00:35:08,800 And some of you may know of this wonderful orchestra composition called Composition by Joel Thompson called the Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, 282 00:35:08,800 --> 00:35:11,390 which is composed in 2014. 283 00:35:11,390 --> 00:35:19,300 He looks at that to string the recent string of young black men who have been killed from Trayvon Martin through to Floyd George, 284 00:35:19,300 --> 00:35:27,820 who all as the police knelt on their necks and forced them down, prevented them from bleeding, squeezed the life out of them. 285 00:35:27,820 --> 00:35:37,510 The last words were that they could not breathe. And he incorporates this into a composition which, when it was first performed in 2014, 286 00:35:37,510 --> 00:35:41,350 audiences walked out, thought up the performance notes and so on. 287 00:35:41,350 --> 00:35:45,580 But this year has gained a certain kind of balance. 288 00:35:45,580 --> 00:35:52,060 And why bring this up is the kind of resonance between the killings of Dalitz 289 00:35:52,060 --> 00:35:57,610 and a growing swell of protest against that in India and the killing of blacks. 290 00:35:57,610 --> 00:36:01,770 The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement around five years ago. 291 00:36:01,770 --> 00:36:09,150 And and it's surfacing again, gaining a certain powerful traction as a result of. 292 00:36:09,150 --> 00:36:13,540 Did they factor? I cannot breathe being our condition right now, it speaks to us. 293 00:36:13,540 --> 00:36:21,610 It speaks to every human being on the planet. And regardless of the fact that the seven last words of the unarmed actually 294 00:36:21,610 --> 00:36:28,130 worked on the liturgical structure of eight and seven last words of Christ. 295 00:36:28,130 --> 00:36:36,600 That is kind of an abstruse reference, right, to a certain classical canon. 296 00:36:36,600 --> 00:36:43,920 Words of the cooler's have implanted themselves in a consciousness that speaks 297 00:36:43,920 --> 00:36:49,710 to the zero degree in some senses about eternity or certain individuals, 298 00:36:49,710 --> 00:36:55,380 that some people are considered more human than the others. So this is something that we need to think about. 299 00:36:55,380 --> 00:37:02,490 So even as we think about the continuing violence in India, the growth of banned democracy. 300 00:37:02,490 --> 00:37:07,680 Current uptick on the increasing suppression of dissent. 301 00:37:07,680 --> 00:37:12,030 The exacerbation of forms of structural violence in India. 302 00:37:12,030 --> 00:37:20,440 We are also seeing that kind of engagement with this, which hopefully will result in new forms of politics at the end of this. 303 00:37:20,440 --> 00:37:25,770 Now, this may be because somebody said I appear to be untrue, Zack, when I said this to them, 304 00:37:25,770 --> 00:37:32,690 but but I remain eternally optimistic about the possibilities of Indian democracy. 305 00:37:32,690 --> 00:37:37,290 Two other aspects that I would like to speak about before I end. 306 00:37:37,290 --> 00:37:46,110 I don't want to speak for too long because as most of you may have experienced this alongside the coronaviruses, the providers of webinar. 307 00:37:46,110 --> 00:37:54,180 As you know, there are webinars galore right now. And now you are related every step and every second of the day by the possibility 308 00:37:54,180 --> 00:37:59,610 of somebody wanting to give you information on everything under the sun. 309 00:37:59,610 --> 00:38:09,120 So if you think about the image that stays with us from the time of Cubitt in India. 310 00:38:09,120 --> 00:38:17,910 What does become evident, really, is the fact of the hugely hierarchical nature of Indian society. 311 00:38:17,910 --> 00:38:21,990 As I said, where some are more human than the others. 312 00:38:21,990 --> 00:38:32,940 And what we saw was the with the declaration of lockdown, the huge abandonment of labour that large numbers of workers, 313 00:38:32,940 --> 00:38:41,670 migrant workers began these incredible journeys, the ill, the ailing, the young travelling one hundred thousand kilometres. 314 00:38:41,670 --> 00:38:52,390 Walking on foot using bicycle's walking along rail tracks, which led to one of the disasters of people sleeping migrants being moved down by a train. 315 00:38:52,390 --> 00:39:06,840 That what we have seen, it's become evident. To us, outwardly evident that those who are on the fringes of our imagination, for most Indian citizens, 316 00:39:06,840 --> 00:39:17,400 the prevalence to small and medium enterprises, the phenomenon of unpaid labour, sweatshops, etc., remains at the margins of their consciousness. 317 00:39:17,400 --> 00:39:24,540 But here it came to be at the centre of what we saw of ourselves as a nation and of ourselves as citizens, 318 00:39:24,540 --> 00:39:29,550 and the fact that some citizens could merely be abandoned and that they in fact, 319 00:39:29,550 --> 00:39:34,470 we could be well asked whether being born in a country granted citizenship. 320 00:39:34,470 --> 00:39:39,480 And what was interesting at the same time as the sense of shock that was repeated in 321 00:39:39,480 --> 00:39:45,630 page after page of newspapers and journal articles and visual images in cartoons, 322 00:39:45,630 --> 00:39:48,780 those if you've been following the media, you do this. 323 00:39:48,780 --> 00:39:58,170 This is a period that you use a rich hall of outrage, so to speak, against the heartlessness at the heart of Indian society. 324 00:39:58,170 --> 00:40:03,630 But alongside this was a certain kind of post-colonial sentimentality. 325 00:40:03,630 --> 00:40:11,690 So if you think about India, a post 1947 and these slogans of populist slogans of Indira Gandhi of Goodey, 326 00:40:11,690 --> 00:40:22,410 be her now India lite lives in its villages, the nobility of the poor, which then became the kind of true major trope in Bollywood cinema. 327 00:40:22,410 --> 00:40:28,650 A lot of that continue to persist where the idea of this abandonment of labour went alongside 328 00:40:28,650 --> 00:40:34,560 the idea that are shared are wretched huddled masses and they are being massacred yet again. 329 00:40:34,560 --> 00:40:42,060 But there was very little intervention that could happen, happen, a little intervention that was initiated in order to actually handle this. 330 00:40:42,060 --> 00:40:51,030 And those of few who saw those panicky scenes off at bus stations across India as migrants tried to get on again, 331 00:40:51,030 --> 00:41:00,590 brought back memories like in nineteen eighty four of the partition of the sugar rush of people abandoned by a state. 332 00:41:00,590 --> 00:41:08,790 The sheer rush of people who abandoned me probably presumes that the state actually cared for them. 333 00:41:08,790 --> 00:41:16,470 So we're actually talking about a situation where it became evident that the day existed in as much as they were afforded 334 00:41:16,470 --> 00:41:26,250 to a larger enterprise of labour and of the relations that face close relations between state and capital in India. 335 00:41:26,250 --> 00:41:38,250 And following on from this, and this is a question that we have to ask as to what will follow as India enters one of its worst economic phases. 336 00:41:38,250 --> 00:41:44,610 One of the things that's doing the rounds on social media is how even Bangladesh and Pakistan have got ahead of us. 337 00:41:44,610 --> 00:41:53,700 And the internationals is hugely irked by this fact that the projections for, you know, for the growth of GDP up a low. 338 00:41:53,700 --> 00:42:03,360 So what is going to happen to India after lockdown? And signs of this are becoming evident again in that one state, a lawless state with trepidation, 339 00:42:03,360 --> 00:42:12,300 where over 30 of the 35 labour law and legislation laws have been removed from the books. 340 00:42:12,300 --> 00:42:24,120 So when people when labour stocks returning, it can be fees to the draconian authoritarian regime within which hours of work conditions of work pay, 341 00:42:24,120 --> 00:42:31,820 all of which will be decided by that huge leviathan, the state and capital and. 342 00:42:31,820 --> 00:42:43,010 The question of. The abandonment of labour in after during lock down will be replaced by a complete coercion and control of labour. 343 00:42:43,010 --> 00:42:49,760 In the months to come, in the years to come and this is, again, something that we need to be thinking about seriously. 344 00:42:49,760 --> 00:42:53,900 There hasn't been sufficient awareness, sufficient writing about it. 345 00:42:53,900 --> 00:42:55,670 What if you follow the newspapers? 346 00:42:55,670 --> 00:43:04,280 You begin to see how state and capital are working together in order to create the new regime of productivity that will emerge. 347 00:43:04,280 --> 00:43:10,370 And this is a phenomenon we have seen before. Right? We think about the 2008 financial recession again, state. 348 00:43:10,370 --> 00:43:17,920 The state comes to the rescue of capital. Here again, you find the state coming to the rescue of capital. 349 00:43:17,920 --> 00:43:26,120 And so what we have to think about is this whole question that is central to our understanding of Indian democracy. 350 00:43:26,120 --> 00:43:30,590 You've spoken about democracy. Spoken about authoritarian populism. 351 00:43:30,590 --> 00:43:38,950 You've talked about the forms of heartlessness and abandonment of significant sections of India's working population, 352 00:43:38,950 --> 00:43:42,770 that if it is if we are to speak about democracy, 353 00:43:42,770 --> 00:43:47,570 not only as founded procedurally on the holding of elections and so on and so forth, 354 00:43:47,570 --> 00:43:53,840 the existence of balance of powers, the existence of a constitution, fear to think about the spirit of democracy. 355 00:43:53,840 --> 00:44:01,140 And we go back to that triad of the French Revolution of equality, liberty and fraternity. 356 00:44:01,140 --> 00:44:12,540 What is increasingly becoming epic? Is that why equality exists in the Constitution and is legislated liberty exists but 357 00:44:12,540 --> 00:44:18,360 is being slowly whittle away by the government's draconian policies on dissent? 358 00:44:18,360 --> 00:44:24,690 Fraternity has never existed in a class society such as ours. 359 00:44:24,690 --> 00:44:31,770 The very fact that at the height of cool and the people who were targets of attack. 360 00:44:31,770 --> 00:44:37,140 And she'd been reading the newspaper, the people who are targets of attack were people like delivery boys, 361 00:44:37,140 --> 00:44:46,680 people who were gathering garbage, people who were nurses working in medical establishments, all of those who were dealing with. 362 00:44:46,680 --> 00:44:52,440 Were either Labour, who all who were dealing with dirt and disease, 363 00:44:52,440 --> 00:44:59,970 were marginalised or marginalised in fundamental ways so that there were attacks on nurses who came from the Northeast, 364 00:44:59,970 --> 00:45:05,850 attacks on nurses who came from southern India and were dark skinned in northern India. 365 00:45:05,850 --> 00:45:10,710 This question of the absence of fraternity amongst Indians. 366 00:45:10,710 --> 00:45:16,500 So when you say Indians, it's a merely sentimental category, even rejuvenated by any fellow feeling. 367 00:45:16,500 --> 00:45:23,190 And this question that America left for us of the resolution of maty resolution, 368 00:45:23,190 --> 00:45:28,860 of fellowship, of fraternity, of friendship, that that needed to undergird democracy. 369 00:45:28,860 --> 00:45:33,660 But as he said, what we have is a democracy and a fundamentally undemocratic side. 370 00:45:33,660 --> 00:45:37,020 And all of that is becoming very evident right now. 371 00:45:37,020 --> 00:45:45,900 So the question that we have to ask ourselves again is how are we to rebuild or build fraternity in a society that 372 00:45:45,900 --> 00:45:53,460 is nakedly driven now by these kinds of differences between human beings who will live and who will not live, 373 00:45:53,460 --> 00:45:59,710 which is not the sovereign who decides who will live. It is a societal. 374 00:45:59,710 --> 00:46:05,200 Consciousness that determines who is worthy of life and who is it. 375 00:46:05,200 --> 00:46:09,220 And this is something that has been revealed to us in its darkest week. 376 00:46:09,220 --> 00:46:12,750 In India right now and. 377 00:46:12,750 --> 00:46:20,940 What we have to ask, whether it is whether we are thinking about cost in India, whether we are thinking about that racial democracy, 378 00:46:20,940 --> 00:46:26,640 because the United States or we are thinking about a Europe increasingly defining itself 379 00:46:26,640 --> 00:46:35,460 in Christian ways as against Islam and with a huge incoming of migrants from 2016 onward, 380 00:46:35,460 --> 00:46:41,030 debate, identity, the unsought identity of Europe as a Christian Europe. 381 00:46:41,030 --> 00:46:48,330 It all is presented itself as secular, multicultural and so on. What democracies will have to face across the board after Kosovo. 382 00:46:48,330 --> 00:46:54,480 It is the question of fraternity in democracies. So I think I will stop here. 383 00:46:54,480 --> 00:47:02,070 And for those of you who want to think about some of these issues. 384 00:47:02,070 --> 00:47:12,810 In terms of a particular junctures of the you know, so for example, the publication of Visible Wilkerson's book on co-starring, 385 00:47:12,810 --> 00:47:19,260 which attempts to create a connexion between cost and trees and to argue from the experience, 386 00:47:19,260 --> 00:47:26,530 show that the experience of the Dalit is similar to the experience of the African-American in the United States and India. 387 00:47:26,530 --> 00:47:32,700 She's not new in positing this. She follows a huge line from DWB Dubois onwards. 388 00:47:32,700 --> 00:47:40,140 To be a Negro is to ride a Jim Crow in Georgia. That statement, at least, is a visceral experience for equality. 389 00:47:40,140 --> 00:47:43,410 And if one looks at all the reviews that appeared, which are fairly academic, 390 00:47:43,410 --> 00:47:51,210 written by largely upper class and white academics, which argued that, well, you know, this is really academically slippery. 391 00:47:51,210 --> 00:47:55,560 How do you make an equation between costume race is different and so on? 392 00:47:55,560 --> 00:48:04,590 But at the heart of that book was something that I was pointing to Floyd George saying I can breathe, which speaks to all of us as humans. 393 00:48:04,590 --> 00:48:10,860 The other thing is that for those of us who've been stuck at home watching Netflix. 394 00:48:10,860 --> 00:48:17,700 And really put him in. That sounds like despair. I think most of us are enjoying being stuck at home watching Netflix. 395 00:48:17,700 --> 00:48:25,530 You've seen a whole number of serials and films that have been coming out, including Bartal, Luke, Muz, 396 00:48:25,530 --> 00:48:36,180 Upwood and so on, which take up this issue of cost, take up this issue of the migrant, take up this issue off. 397 00:48:36,180 --> 00:48:38,980 The deep divisions within Indian society. 398 00:48:38,980 --> 00:48:48,850 But interestingly enough, we are still stuck with the paradigm of that post-colonial sentimentality, which banishes the idea of cost to the village. 399 00:48:48,850 --> 00:48:52,720 As with some Benegal spoons, now it's the rise of the small town. 400 00:48:52,720 --> 00:48:58,840 So the Anurag Kashyap School of Filmmaking has now seeped into the kinds of foods that are coming 401 00:48:58,840 --> 00:49:04,450 out to Netflix because it is not something that constitutes the upper caste secularly imagination. 402 00:49:04,450 --> 00:49:10,630 It's something that comes from the small town. So you've moved away from the village to village has receded from my imagination. 403 00:49:10,630 --> 00:49:16,660 It's a small town that has emerged with IPL and other phenomena, which, again, 404 00:49:16,660 --> 00:49:21,370 cricket is a major part of Indian consciousness, almost as much as Costis, 405 00:49:21,370 --> 00:49:30,730 where the idea of the hierarchies that govern Indian society were first located in the village are now located in the small town. 406 00:49:30,730 --> 00:49:37,710 And for those of you who saw Indian matchmaking, which came out on Netflix, I had read the discussion in India. 407 00:49:37,710 --> 00:49:45,770 It exemplified what Ambedkar called the deep biological trinke that runs through Indian society, 408 00:49:45,770 --> 00:49:50,530 where Indians are divided from one another by cost will not marry. 409 00:49:50,530 --> 00:50:01,620 NPA and doggedness, which takes us back to the question of the possibility of Maytree and fraternity has hoovered exacerbated. 410 00:50:01,620 --> 00:50:10,540 The demise of fraternity. As cooled allowed us to think about new forms of fraternity. 411 00:50:10,540 --> 00:50:19,900 Only time will tell. Now, stop here. Thank you. Oh, did it. 412 00:50:19,900 --> 00:50:25,990 Thank you so much. Burnetts certainly wonderful talk. 413 00:50:25,990 --> 00:50:35,560 And for finishing for giving us a great overview that connects history with the present. 414 00:50:35,560 --> 00:50:45,550 That connects cards with class, with race, that connects the various challenges to democracy that we have all experienced, 415 00:50:45,550 --> 00:50:53,500 particularly since NEITZEL classes and more particularly since the arrival of Kove IT. 416 00:50:53,500 --> 00:51:06,340 And thank you very much indeed for finishing with some very thought provoking and useful questions as as we move on for next week. 417 00:51:06,340 --> 00:51:11,830 Can I announce that on Tuesday, the twenty seventh of October we have? 418 00:51:11,830 --> 00:51:17,710 Joining us in Oxford, Philip Lott Condor's from the University of Iowa. 419 00:51:17,710 --> 00:51:26,470 And the title of Philip's talk is Chai. Why the Making of the Indian National Drink, please. 420 00:51:26,470 --> 00:51:29,980 Those of you were interested in joining for this talk. 421 00:51:29,980 --> 00:51:36,880 Would you register for a ticket via Eventbrite in the way that you did in order to join this talk? 422 00:51:36,880 --> 00:51:43,540 So we will all thank you very much indeed. And look forward to future discussions. 423 00:51:43,540 --> 00:51:54,057 Thank you. Thank you, Dad. Thank you.