New India's World
Centre for Global South Asian Studies, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies is pleased to invite you to an international workshop
The idea of 'new India' has by now become shorthand for the forward march of a nation long deemed to be 'held back' by the tide of history.
The suffix 'new' representing awe and excitement of novelty in our times is now firmly entwined with the process of economic reforms initiated more than two decades ago. The nation's shift towards free markets and global capital, and its ascent as a prominent and desirable 'emerging market', is now central not only to the ongoing dramatic reconfiguration inside the social-political landscape, but also to the ways in which India presents itself and is perceived on the outside. The very idea of India, we are now told, is in a state of flux where the fundamentals are being questioned, challenged and revised.
The crux of these arguments is that the Nehruvian era is finally over. Or put differently, the Nehruvian edifice that was steadily chipped away at since the economic reforms is now thought to be in an ultimate state of decay.
What is less clear in this discourse however is the form of the new ideological scaffolding being put in its place. What is the shape and aesthetics of this new? And what forms of the past are effaced, and what are revived in the making of this new India?
This workshop is an invitation to rethink the question of novelty shaped around the dynamics of old/new, ancient/modern, authentic/inauthentic and vernacular/foreign from a location like post-reform India that is both unsettling and unsettled.
Speakers
- Sushil Aaron, Hindustan Times
- Rina Agarwala, Johns Hopkins University
- Paula Chakravartty, New York University
- Faisal Devji, Oxford University
- Nandini Gooptu, Oxford University
- Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University
- Shruti Kapila, Cambridge University
- Ravinder Kaur, University of Copenahagen
- David Ludden, New York University
- Srirupa Roy, Gottingen University
- Sanjay Srivastava, Jawaharlal Nehru University
- Luisa Steur, University of Copenhagen
- Varun Sahni, Jawaharlal Nehru University
- Nandini Sundar, Delhi University
- Siddharth Varadarajan, Shiv Nadar University
Registration is required. Please write to Therese Mortensen.