It will take a few seconds. Well, good afternoon, everybody.
It's my great pleasure to welcome you to this second meeting of our Oxford South Asian modern South Asia seminars.
Today, again, taking advantage of the willingness of people and scholars across the world to give us talk,
which is a silver lining in the cloud of the pandemic. We extend a very warm welcome to Professor Dilip Menin.
Dilip is Melan professor of Indian Studies and director of the Centre of Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Voters.
And now DeLay cannot delay Condi. I hope that it won't mind my saying this back a very long way together.
Dilip was really one of the very first pioneers with his cultural history in the field, in the field of subalterns,
studies considered in its broad cultural broadest cultural dimensions and with
his his pathbreaking book Cost Nationalism and Communism in South India,
published in 1994. Elipse Perspectives on caste, on caste identity, on Dalit identity,
on untouchability in the colonial era were really tremendously important in showing us what could be done with us.
When a historian was willing to look at all kinds of unusual sources, such as oral histories,
Ballards and and what had hitherto been considered the ephemera of colonial social history.
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,
not just of scholarly essays, but also of broader essays addressing important questions of cultural history, literature, theatre and so on.
And it's it's very engaging and impressive.
See now the turn that did its work has taken towards the global.
This is in his most recent capitalisms of global history.
An edited volume with Oxford University Press that came out in February this year.
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.
Labour, really, the differences that are all too often subsumed under some monolithic notion that capitalism is it takes only one particular form.
And what we have to look forward to, I believe, next year is another work of global history,
another volume bringing together foremost scholars in the field.
Concepts from the Global South do arc, which is due out with Rutledge,
in which Dilip and his colleagues and I have to say I haven't read this, but I look forward to it read keenly.
Philip and his colleagues really draw out the nuances of a whole range of culturally critical words in languages from across the global south.
And that very careful focus on terms, on their nuances, on their changing forms over time, their cultural ramifications.
I think we can anticipate an absolute feast and a real expansion of our understanding of the interface between politics, language and culture.
Now, today, appropriately, and we're most grateful to do it for the arts during our call.
The TV available to talk to us today most appropriately.
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.
Please let me hand over to you. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Polly. And thank you, Andrea. Thank you for inviting me to old hunting grounds,
even though as a virtual presence and one of the advantages of knowing the person chairing the
session for a very long time is that they're extremely flattering things to say about you.
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,
but on my work as an inhabitant of the universe in a time of crisis.
Because one of the things I think all of us have been doing besides doing scrolling that is,
is to try and be aware of what this pandemic is doing in terms of revealing to us the structures of society,
revealing to us certain existing prejudices, certain political fault lines and so on,
and also requiring us to think about our task as historians writing from a movement which I suppose is unparalleled in our lifetimes.
None of us has experienced lockdown before where we were forcibly confined to our homes in a form of house arrest,
though that would be per putting too much weight on something that didn't demand too much political dissidents from us.
But this whole idea of being in the world as the entire world has become knit together by a common experience of lockdown
is something that tells us that is not possible anymore to study the word from our respective wanted standpoints,
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.
And certainly this follows clues on the heels of the larger political movement
that is happening where we are beginning to look at the answer proceeding. We are beginning to look at human animal relations.
We are beginning to think about global warming, multiple conjunct chairs in which humanity is right now what rich Corbitt as yet another phenomenon.
So one of the things that I think I want to begin with is the fact that conjuncture just
like these revealed to the functioning of society or the dysfunctional nature of societies,
showing US hierarchy is showing US inequality,
showing us the inability of government and civil society to come to terms with certain forms of disorganisation that have set in.
And I am reminded in many senses of the movement fairly early on in my youth,
when some of you may remember the first volumes of Oulton studies came out in nineteen eighty two and I'm off that generation,
which was hugely influenced and decided not to do the national pastime of writing.
The Civil Service examination decided to do history much to the misfortune of the discipline the civilian studies came out.
And then in 1984, two years after the first volume, you had the assassination of Mrs. Indira Gandhi,
which was followed by the large scale massacres of Sikhs, which at that time started the Indian conscience.
Unfortunately, this has become a feature. Earlier this year, we saw the programmes in Delhi carried out against Muslims by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
But to go back to 1984 when this happened,
it became evident that much of the exaltation of these spontaneous uprisings of the masses needed to be understood with a clear eye.
And it was professor summit scholar who spoke to us in Delhi at that point and said,
how do we exactly understand civilian agency when it comes to us in a hugely complicated we such as this,
where we are thinking about rivalries of class, caste, political contingencies, ethnicity and so on and so forth.
So similarly, when we think about this conjunction of Cawood,
we need to be aware of the forms of agency that are being accelerated, are being accentuated,
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.
There was a distinction made between heuristically three kinds of time, the time of the Loom Jouvet.
Geological time. The question of climate.
A whole set of historical circumstances would needed to be explained in terms of millennia.
Also the history of events which are shorter, but which. So something like the French Revolution, we did mark a distinct conjuncture.
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.
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.
And we can think about many such in Indian history.
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.
Many memories of the partition surfaced in 1984. People started speaking about the inversion of 1948 and 1984, for example.
And we have in 1992, the BARBREE Masjid event, which, you know,
the destruction of the BARBREE mustered by India fundamentalist, which again called into question the whole paradigm.
But what was interesting about this point is that about the onset of cougar is
that people are suddenly looking back 100 years to the 1918 and the Spanish flu.
And this is something that was an event that had been more or less forgotten.
I mean, not many people remember the Spanish flu except people who had been alive at that time, perhaps.
I mean, I doubt whether such ancient individuals exist,
but these Spanish flu became the kind of resonant moment, the moment that twinned with our present.
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.
It followed a certain crisis, the First World War. But it also sparked off particular crisis within empires.
So the British Empire, for instance, in India, you know, several tens of millions of people died.
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,
whether it was the fact that the British government and India had burned the tents during the 1896 cholera epidemic,
Meditative adopted an extremely interventionist approach which was seen by many need to each side as kind of being an attack on Indian society.
And its cultural norms led to the first political assassination in India.
WG ran the play commissioner and were named by two prime Inuit's who felt that Indian culture was under threat.
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,
as it were, in 1918. The scale of deaths is very high.
Certainly we're nowhere close to that number, but we are talking about a freeing that is happening of society.
And in David Arnold's wonderful essay, he speaks about a very, very poignant instances, like the famous board,
your counterpart in The Rala, writing about how almost his entire family was decimated.
Looking at the River Ganges and seeing it flowing with bodies because bodies could not be cremated.
People are scared about handling bodies which were afflicted with the flu.
Are the famous tiger hunter and conservationist Jim Colvert spoke about how man eating became a phenomenon in the foothills of the Himalayas.
As bodies are abandoned and tigers developed a taste for human flesh and so on and so forth.
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.
This is actually, you know, a phrase of any resonant,
plangent phrase from Walter Benjamin's essay on the philosophy of history and his idea that historians should be critiquing this idea homogeneous,
empty time. That indeed, history is about the flash that connects us to the past,
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.
And in one sense, that is exactly what is happening right now in the middle of the pandemic,
that this conjuncture has summoned up historical memories, that there are ways in which we are thinking about these global connexions of fresh.
A wonderful essays on, for example, the Treaty of Versailles, for example, Treaty of Versailles,
which the harsh terms of which many have argued have led to the rise of Nazis in Germany.
And, of course, this this wonderful essay which speaks about how Woodrow Wilson was suffering from the Spanish flu enfeebled by it.
He couldn't withstand the Manley's George Clemenceau,
who was insisting that harsh terms be levied against their France's rival, Germany, and that Woodrow Wilson caved in.
And so in that sense, the Spanish flu was responsible for the rise of Naziism, Hitler and so on.
So you find a lot of these historical arguments that are circulating which are concerned with the rupture of homogeneous, empty time.
They're reaching back to moments in the past to try and understand these conjuncture is that we are living in.
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.
So regardless whether really we're thinking about both scenario, we're thinking about putting we are thinking about Trump, we think about Erdogan.
We're thinking of that in the movie. We are thinking about forms of authoritarian populism,
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.
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.
And when you think about the welfare state, we think about Social Security, we think about medical insurance.
We think about the fraying of the NHS in Britain. We think about the freeing of the entire public health system in China.
We think about the attack on Obama care in the United States,
where this performative populism is about the presentation of the leader as the person who exemplifies a popular will.
And there has been also a huge deployment to social media.
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,
that very often what triggers political and social action and indeed civil society is based on a mixture of fact and fiction.
And increasingly, the third feature is that we've seen attacks against earlier paradigms.
So whether it is notions of secularism, of liberal societies which are multicultural and accepting of racial and religious differences.
In India, you've seen the attack on Nehru organism, on liberal democracy, on certainly on secularism, forms of social egalitarianism.
But when we look at all of this, there is a way in which we have to think beyond the moment.
And certainly something like the pandemic has required us to ask, is this something that is astonishingly new?
Is this something that is the has become evident and has surfaced in the last two, three years?
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,
also as it is Zelig like character, where he has inserted himself into every previous movement in Indian history
so that the RSS has is seen as playing a role in the independence movement,
which did not enter. Modi has shown himself sitting at the church car very much like Marmar Gandhi and
spitting at the kind of speed that Henry Ford would have appreciated the Chark has.
You noticed a slower, reflective kind of weaving.
So this Zelig like insertion into history, which also is about facing forms of history where history is himself.
All of these. So one begins to ask, this is something that is tremendously new.
And thinking back to the lineages of this authoritarian populism, one can perhaps go back to the forms of mobilisation,
Gandhian mobilisation, which were the politics of exemplary city,
because Gandhi also embodied an authoritarian populism of a certain kind where
it was Gandhi worse as he became the sole spokesperson of Indian nationalism.
And if you think about the writing of Indian nationalism or the writing of national assistance post independence,
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.
People who contended against that, Gandhi, Invision, really Gandhi embodied the people.
He was Christlike on the cross. He died for the sins of India, so to speak.
And so that kind of authoritarian populism which then gained a successor in Nehru.
And I've written about this recently in an article on the emergency where I look at the foremost satirical journal of independent India,
founded in 1949, Chanko weekly, where every page had Nehru writ large it.
So at the same time as Nehru was made the object of satire, gentle satire, no doubt.
He also came to stand in for India. And interestingly enough, Nehru tells Shankar, Don't spare me Shankar.
He says there Shankar is satirical under the direction.
Off the authoritarian populist, so to speak, to particularly the spirit of Kuwait and the kind of tightening there,
certain forms of control and certain forms of responsibility by the state leads us to think back about the genealogy.
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.
But it also needs us to be more thoughtful about the present.
Think about the lineages of the present. Think about the kind of forms of political society, political visions that existed in the past,
which are possibly created and coloured the forms of politics we have now.
The Economist, which I never thought I would be quoting at any point in my life, approvingly or otherwise,
has this wonderful phrase called farm democracy or democracy in the time of pandemics.
And what and what this phrase captures for us is that regardless of where we look right now,
it's India, Brazil, US, etc., that democracy has begun to function in particular forms.
Embodying. Authoritarian at embodying an authoritarian streak where the stifling of dissent,
the stifling of any kind of difference from the attempt to make a national paradigm are treated with violence.
So you see this happening in the US where a large number of Trump supporters have given up the mosque are questioning
the very foundations of racial equality as much as common sense in terms of occupying public space in India.
We've seen the stifling of dissent because just prior to the onset of Gooby, we had that huge explosion of civil dissent.
You know, we had the city against the Citizenship Amendment Act.
You have the emergence of Shaheen Bug in Delhi, where large numbers of them in support began to speak for democracy.
And then Shaheen Bug was replicated all over India very recently.
The Supreme Court has passed a judgement saying that a phenomenon like Shaheen Bug has to be governed by a notion of time,
that it cannot continue, that this cannot be a protest without end, that protests have to be temporarily bound.
Now, needless to that, the circumstances that necessitated the creation of a Shaheen bank haven't vanished.
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.
And so what you see in this period of democracy is, one, the stifling of dissent.
There is a way in which the earlier upsurge of activity is more or less come to an end,
largely because of social distancing, lockdown and so on and so forth.
But there is an ongoing attack on one intellectual bastions like General Electric University.
There is also the use of the, ironically, a law introduced by the previous government,
the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and Cubitt has become the time to round up dissent.
So we have seen over a period of time the arrest of eminent poets and activists like whatever we have seen.
The former editor of GBW, Gautam Moloch, has been arrested. The Dalit intellectual and thinker on until 10 days in jail.
S.G. and say that I was a lecturer at Yale University, honeybun, we could go on.
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.
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.
Because if you think about the case that was filed against the citizenship amendment and the activists opposing the Citizenship Amendment Act,
it was seventeen thousand five hundred pages of documents which took on the programme that happened earlier this year against Muslims in Delhi.
And it is only those who are protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act will be nameless,
not those who call for violence against Muslims and so on. Another absurd archive.
You have my colleague, the student leader from JNU,
who was asked to read one point one million pages of documents in a week in order to defend himself.
So the band Democracy has created a form of excess and excess of documentation,
an excess of documentation which records every form of political expression as dissent.
So you have there is no gradation as to the difference between Brother Rao and a lot of Khaleed.
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
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.
And those of you, again, have been who have been following the news, knew that at the heart of this,
at the heart of this is the violence that happened in 2018 at Pima County now where the celebrated large
numbers of Dalitz gathered to celebrate a formal victory in the colonial period and against them,
Morato US. And there was a huge attack on them. Large numbers of adults were killed.
The violence was seen as being orchestrated by these very figures who are now being arrested.
So be being it now has become a kind of catchall phrase for to arrest and to suppress dissent.
And we have an increasing form of surveillance that is coming into operation.
Those of you who are familiar again, and I've been following the news,
know that the gunman restraints do something called the AHTO app, the health app, which would be on your phone.
What it basically meant that it would track your movements wherever you were, whatever you were doing.
Large numbers of people, of course, raise the issue of privacy, as they did earlier with the outside.
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.
Right. That in the time of Corona, Corona, that's a kind of panopticon that the Gonnerman tests state to create,
which tries to enact a form of surveillance against every citizen.
So what is happening to democracy at this point is that democracy is not built.
It's not premised anymore on the idea of civil society and dissent,
which is based on this performative authoritarian populism, which is also based on a sidelining of parliament.
All of this becomes possible because of the lockdown and because of your ability
of the government in the interests of the larger interest of hell than of fear,
of contagion and so on, to contain the numbers of people on the street,
contain protests on the streets so that when you had the recent passing of the Farm Act,
which basically removes the minimum support price for farmers,
grants huge authority to corporates to not only determine the trajectory of agricultural production,
but also to gain control over the little farms that exist and on farmers decisions.
The Farm Act was passed in a matter of. A few days without any discussion whatsoever.
So we have to think about it. The authoritarian populism and democracy.
The other question that we need to think about, which is very crucial, is the fact that.
If India is largely and increasingly it is becoming evident, it's a hierarchical,
inegalitarian and violent society which imagines itself through who it inflicts violence on,
so be upon the lynchings of Muslims who have had the killings of phthalates.
The recent hottest case, Theroux's the rule of law to the winds.
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.
I'm sorry, I'm just getting various things popping up on my screen. Yes. Here I it back again.
So the question here is that this whole idea of who belongs to the nation was raised.
First by the Citizenship Amendment Act, by the.
Government saying that those who came from outside India, particularly countries like Bangladesh,
Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, could not be deemed to be citizens of India.
Very clear. This was a kind of dog whistle to the Hindu constituency about keeping out the Muslims.
But it is also clear that it's not only those who come from outside, but those who live within, who are being marginalised.
And we are seeing increasingly under Cubitt forms of violence that are increasing rule of law that is being abandoned.
And the number of cases of attacks on Dalitz and Muslims has actually spiked in this period.
And the recent statistics as to the numbers of Dalitz and Muslims in prison,
not alarming because there is a hugely disproportionate to their actual numbers in the population, not into this kind of.
Field, where if the Citizenship Amendment Act was about defining who did not belong in terms of the insider and the outsider.
The whole issue of the Dalit and Muslim within the country has become that of the insider outsider.
Somebody who is within society but who is permanently on the margin.
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,
for example, India's hidden apartheid, as he calls it.
And the fact that there has been this consistent low grade fever since 1947 of the impunity with which Dalitz had been killed,
Dalit villagers have been torched, Dalit women have been raped. All of these are in some sense acquiring more and more frequency and increasingly
also finding more and more prominence so that there is a whole generation undercook.
It was also rekeying activists. Now, it's not as if this did not exist.
You think about the Kilbane mining massacre, massacre of nineteen sixty eight.
We are actually at 41. Dalitz burned alive in their village.
But there were there was a way in which all of this was kept under the radar in secular India,
where religious violence was seen as more important than violence against Dalit.
But undercover, I think not only are the incidents of violence growing, the perception of violence is growing as well.
And this is an important fact that we need to take into account that the recent High Court, Allahabad High Court judgement,
we tend to assume that the state of with their produce is beyond redemption,
controlled entirely by the chief minister, RJ Wisht, who calls himself first saw me something or the other.
I forget his name. So Jeb Bush has unleashed a reign of terror over the alarm about high court has said
that the actions of the police and burning the rape victim were illegal right now.
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.
Is required has been required to become more active, a public conscience has been aroused,
and so this conjuncture is something that sees both the kind of exacerbation of state authoritarianism,
but is also seeing a rising swell of public dissent and of this.
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.
So this question of the untouchable, the question of the Dalit,
the question of the Dalit at the heart of India is something that has increasingly begun to surface.
And here again, if one thinks about what is happening in the United States is interesting and the other democracy,
and we call ourselves the world's most populous democracy, America calls into the world's oldest democracy and so on.
And so for the various ways in which countries which are governed by authoritarian populist claim the title of Democrats and a democracy.
The killing of Flight George earlier this year.
Rejuvenated the Black Lives Matter movement. And I think.
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.
His last words were, I could not.
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.
It attacks the respiratory system. So this. Became a metaphor almost as I cannot breathe.
Is the condition of human civilisation right now. And George Floyds last words touched a chord somewhere.
And some of you may know of this wonderful orchestra composition called Composition by Joel Thompson called the Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,
which is composed in 2014.
He looks at that to string the recent string of young black men who have been killed from Trayvon Martin through to Floyd George,
who all as the police knelt on their necks and forced them down, prevented them from bleeding, squeezed the life out of them.
The last words were that they could not breathe. And he incorporates this into a composition which, when it was first performed in 2014,
audiences walked out, thought up the performance notes and so on.
But this year has gained a certain kind of balance.
And why bring this up is the kind of resonance between the killings of Dalitz
and a growing swell of protest against that in India and the killing of blacks.
The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement around five years ago.
And and it's surfacing again, gaining a certain powerful traction as a result of.
Did they factor? I cannot breathe being our condition right now, it speaks to us.
It speaks to every human being on the planet. And regardless of the fact that the seven last words of the unarmed actually
worked on the liturgical structure of eight and seven last words of Christ.
That is kind of an abstruse reference, right, to a certain classical canon.
Words of the cooler's have implanted themselves in a consciousness that speaks
to the zero degree in some senses about eternity or certain individuals,
that some people are considered more human than the others. So this is something that we need to think about.
So even as we think about the continuing violence in India, the growth of banned democracy.
Current uptick on the increasing suppression of dissent.
The exacerbation of forms of structural violence in India.
We are also seeing that kind of engagement with this, which hopefully will result in new forms of politics at the end of this.
Now, this may be because somebody said I appear to be untrue, Zack, when I said this to them,
but but I remain eternally optimistic about the possibilities of Indian democracy.
Two other aspects that I would like to speak about before I end.
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.
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
of somebody wanting to give you information on everything under the sun.
So if you think about the image that stays with us from the time of Cubitt in India.
What does become evident, really, is the fact of the hugely hierarchical nature of Indian society.
As I said, where some are more human than the others.
And what we saw was the with the declaration of lockdown, the huge abandonment of labour that large numbers of workers,
migrant workers began these incredible journeys, the ill, the ailing, the young travelling one hundred thousand kilometres.
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.
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,
the prevalence to small and medium enterprises, the phenomenon of unpaid labour, sweatshops, etc., remains at the margins of their consciousness.
But here it came to be at the centre of what we saw of ourselves as a nation and of ourselves as citizens,
and the fact that some citizens could merely be abandoned and that they in fact,
we could be well asked whether being born in a country granted citizenship.
And what was interesting at the same time as the sense of shock that was repeated in
page after page of newspapers and journal articles and visual images in cartoons,
those if you've been following the media, you do this.
This is a period that you use a rich hall of outrage, so to speak, against the heartlessness at the heart of Indian society.
But alongside this was a certain kind of post-colonial sentimentality.
So if you think about India, a post 1947 and these slogans of populist slogans of Indira Gandhi of Goodey,
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.
A lot of that continue to persist where the idea of this abandonment of labour went alongside
the idea that are shared are wretched huddled masses and they are being massacred yet again.
But there was very little intervention that could happen, happen, a little intervention that was initiated in order to actually handle this.
And those of few who saw those panicky scenes off at bus stations across India as migrants tried to get on again,
brought back memories like in nineteen eighty four of the partition of the sugar rush of people abandoned by a state.
The sheer rush of people who abandoned me probably presumes that the state actually cared for them.
So we're actually talking about a situation where it became evident that the day existed in as much as they were afforded
to a larger enterprise of labour and of the relations that face close relations between state and capital in India.
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.
One of the things that's doing the rounds on social media is how even Bangladesh and Pakistan have got ahead of us.
And the internationals is hugely irked by this fact that the projections for, you know, for the growth of GDP up a low.
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,
where over 30 of the 35 labour law and legislation laws have been removed from the books.
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,
all of which will be decided by that huge leviathan, the state and capital and.
The question of. The abandonment of labour in after during lock down will be replaced by a complete coercion and control of labour.
In the months to come, in the years to come and this is, again, something that we need to be thinking about seriously.
There hasn't been sufficient awareness, sufficient writing about it.
What if you follow the newspapers?
You begin to see how state and capital are working together in order to create the new regime of productivity that will emerge.
And this is a phenomenon we have seen before. Right? We think about the 2008 financial recession again, state.
The state comes to the rescue of capital. Here again, you find the state coming to the rescue of capital.
And so what we have to think about is this whole question that is central to our understanding of Indian democracy.
You've spoken about democracy. Spoken about authoritarian populism.
You've talked about the forms of heartlessness and abandonment of significant sections of India's working population,
that if it is if we are to speak about democracy,
not only as founded procedurally on the holding of elections and so on and so forth,
the existence of balance of powers, the existence of a constitution, fear to think about the spirit of democracy.
And we go back to that triad of the French Revolution of equality, liberty and fraternity.
What is increasingly becoming epic? Is that why equality exists in the Constitution and is legislated liberty exists but
is being slowly whittle away by the government's draconian policies on dissent?
Fraternity has never existed in a class society such as ours.
The very fact that at the height of cool and the people who were targets of attack.
And she'd been reading the newspaper, the people who are targets of attack were people like delivery boys,
people who were gathering garbage, people who were nurses working in medical establishments, all of those who were dealing with.
Were either Labour, who all who were dealing with dirt and disease,
were marginalised or marginalised in fundamental ways so that there were attacks on nurses who came from the Northeast,
attacks on nurses who came from southern India and were dark skinned in northern India.
This question of the absence of fraternity amongst Indians.
So when you say Indians, it's a merely sentimental category, even rejuvenated by any fellow feeling.
And this question that America left for us of the resolution of maty resolution,
of fellowship, of fraternity, of friendship, that that needed to undergird democracy.
But as he said, what we have is a democracy and a fundamentally undemocratic side.
And all of that is becoming very evident right now.
So the question that we have to ask ourselves again is how are we to rebuild or build fraternity in a society that
is nakedly driven now by these kinds of differences between human beings who will live and who will not live,
which is not the sovereign who decides who will live. It is a societal.
Consciousness that determines who is worthy of life and who is it.
And this is something that has been revealed to us in its darkest week.
In India right now and.
What we have to ask, whether it is whether we are thinking about cost in India, whether we are thinking about that racial democracy,
because the United States or we are thinking about a Europe increasingly defining itself
in Christian ways as against Islam and with a huge incoming of migrants from 2016 onward,
debate, identity, the unsought identity of Europe as a Christian Europe.
It all is presented itself as secular, multicultural and so on. What democracies will have to face across the board after Kosovo.
It is the question of fraternity in democracies. So I think I will stop here.
And for those of you who want to think about some of these issues.
In terms of a particular junctures of the you know, so for example, the publication of Visible Wilkerson's book on co-starring,
which attempts to create a connexion between cost and trees and to argue from the experience,
show that the experience of the Dalit is similar to the experience of the African-American in the United States and India.
She's not new in positing this. She follows a huge line from DWB Dubois onwards.
To be a Negro is to ride a Jim Crow in Georgia. That statement, at least, is a visceral experience for equality.
And if one looks at all the reviews that appeared, which are fairly academic,
written by largely upper class and white academics, which argued that, well, you know, this is really academically slippery.
How do you make an equation between costume race is different and so on?
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.
The other thing is that for those of us who've been stuck at home watching Netflix.
And really put him in. That sounds like despair. I think most of us are enjoying being stuck at home watching Netflix.
You've seen a whole number of serials and films that have been coming out, including Bartal, Luke, Muz,
Upwood and so on, which take up this issue of cost, take up this issue of the migrant, take up this issue off.
The deep divisions within Indian society.
But interestingly enough, we are still stuck with the paradigm of that post-colonial sentimentality, which banishes the idea of cost to the village.
As with some Benegal spoons, now it's the rise of the small town.
So the Anurag Kashyap School of Filmmaking has now seeped into the kinds of foods that are coming
out to Netflix because it is not something that constitutes the upper caste secularly imagination.
It's something that comes from the small town. So you've moved away from the village to village has receded from my imagination.
It's a small town that has emerged with IPL and other phenomena, which, again,
cricket is a major part of Indian consciousness, almost as much as Costis,
where the idea of the hierarchies that govern Indian society were first located in the village are now located in the small town.
And for those of you who saw Indian matchmaking, which came out on Netflix, I had read the discussion in India.
It exemplified what Ambedkar called the deep biological trinke that runs through Indian society,
where Indians are divided from one another by cost will not marry.
NPA and doggedness, which takes us back to the question of the possibility of Maytree and fraternity has hoovered exacerbated.
The demise of fraternity. As cooled allowed us to think about new forms of fraternity.
Only time will tell. Now, stop here. Thank you. Oh, did it.
Thank you so much. Burnetts certainly wonderful talk.
And for finishing for giving us a great overview that connects history with the present.
That connects cards with class, with race, that connects the various challenges to democracy that we have all experienced,
particularly since NEITZEL classes and more particularly since the arrival of Kove IT.
And thank you very much indeed for finishing with some very thought provoking and useful questions as as we move on for next week.
Can I announce that on Tuesday, the twenty seventh of October we have?
Joining us in Oxford, Philip Lott Condor's from the University of Iowa.
And the title of Philip's talk is Chai. Why the Making of the Indian National Drink, please.
Those of you were interested in joining for this talk.
Would you register for a ticket via Eventbrite in the way that you did in order to join this talk?
So we will all thank you very much indeed. And look forward to future discussions.
Thank you. Thank you, Dad. Thank you.