Life-en-treats

In continuation with a post on Kumkum Roy's lecture that I had posted on the CCS course discussion livejounral community, Prathamesh T and I had a conversation. Here it is: Dear All, Prathamesh T and Sushumna Kannan had this conversation over chat this morning (on a shaky internet connection that demanded much patience) and would like to share it with all of you. Please do respond with more comments, clarifications etc. We hope to keep our conversation going and will be glad if others pitched in as well. Warmly Sushumna Kannan Prathamesh T Saturday Jan 17th 2009. me: Hi! prathamesh.t: hey me: So tell me what would your reply have been like... prathamesh.t: ok I think, some of your objections have inherent assumptions me: ok prathamesh.t: like experience as a sole criterion for knowledge creation or rather obtaining knowledge. Go on. me: No, I don’t think I said it was the sole criterion. But when experience clashes with theorizing, then problems arise. We might want to think then o...

Jackson, Michael. 2007 Excursions. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press .Notes: xxvii, 295 p. ; 25 cm. ISBN: 9780822340546 Reviewed 05 Dec 2008 by:Sushumna Kannan sushumnaa@gmail.com >Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, India & University of Jean Moulin, Lyon, France. Medium: Written Literature Subject Keywords: Philosophy, Modern - 20th century Intellectual life - 20th century ABSTRACT: Excursions discusses issues of identity, agency, labor, society-state, subjectivity, violent histories, and colonialism. The discussions are interwoven with the author's experiences, conversations with friends, students, and colleagues; in locations as diverse as London, Sierra Leone, aboriginal Australia and New Zealand. It carries a focus on the 'human condition' and the challenges presented in intercultural encounters. Recent times have seen enormous skepticism about what ethnography can achieve. Ethnography could easily pass for a ventu...

After Kurukshetra is a collection of three new stories by Mahashweta Devi -all have to do with the Kurukshetra battle of Mahabharata and its immediate aftermath. The first story is about five women from the janavritta who are asked to keep company with Uttara, the pregnant young widow of Abhimanyu. It brings out the differences of experiences and views they each present to the other. Devi, much like in her other works, paints a convincingly consistent picture of the ways of the "other" and the marginalized. The aim is to open us up to different feelings, emotions and situations that are also unexpected, and even powerfully shock us out of our own. The women of the janavritta say: "Once we return, all of us together will perform the necessary funerary rituals for our dead. Then the elders will arrange marriages. We need husbands, we need children. The village needs to hear the sound of chatter and laughter. We will...create life. That's what nature teaches us." I...

Posted on the Live Journal community that discusses the CCS course. Dear All, I had been meaning to write on this discussion forum for a long time now. I now take the opportunity do so, given the context of Kumkum Roy’s Lecture and the discussion that followed. For many classes now, I have raised a set of questions and have received few precise answers. Dr Rajan Gurukkal devoted quite some time to my questions, but kept treating history and a specific set of categories sacrosanct, even as the class-syllabus was engaged in bringing in speakers who challenged and ‘pushed’ the boundaries of their disciplines. And yesterday, we again saw that Kumkum Roy refused to state the biases and constraints in her research. Instead it seemed like she took something called “gendered perspectives”, or a “concerns of the 70s” right into the past. To my questions, Roy asked me “where I was coming from?” What that question was actually asking was: “what is your political stance? What is your ideology? Ar...

A couple of years ago I went to France. The first two days were terrible. I was missing India badly. Without much knowledge of the French language, I just sat at home and did what I did best: read up. Then, I managed to get internet at home and from then on, did manage to survive better. (That's probably the first time I became dependent on friends and the internet! Sigh!) I did not like the idea of a blog then and created a google group to which of course I invited none (the same way this blog remains undisclosed). Four pieces I wrote then are as follows: First Post. It’s been 20 days since I arrived in France. I recently got my own Internet and so the hub of activities, of creating writing groups etc. I have read after coming to France: A House for Mr. Biswas, Eastern Philosophy and Time, Space, Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality . For 20 days, that’s not bad at all, right? Other books in progress are Working with Feminist Criticism and The Sage and the Second Sex: Confuciani...

This is a story a friend of mine told me once. She had a friend who wrote great poetry. It was full of deep feelings about death and suffering and she had wondered how and why he could write so beautifully. She asked him how he had come to write about these things with such sensitivity. And he told her that he once had a friend. A great friend. The friend and he walked back together from college everyday. Through woods and rivers. For, that’s the kind of place North Kanara is. One evening the friend stopped on the bridge of the river they crossed everyday on their walk back, saying he wanted to say something to him. They stood on the bridge and friend said, “Don’t believe any of this, it’s all an illusion”. And jumped into the river and died. My friend had gone cold on hearing this. So did I. I was actually jealous of this guy who could jump into the river just like that. We were in a bus. I thought she was in love with this poet-friend. But she had just lost a love and I had too. She ...

P was a great guy. The care he showed to his grandmother, made me think that he was a loving guy. The girl who marries him was a lucky one, I thought to myself. "Jesus Christ", he would say every now and then, I carried that habit with me to India, and curse myself upon saying it. P's parents were separated. I looked closely at him, to see if it had scarred him. Nah, he said. And you? He asked. "I too was like you for many many years, until it got to me." He shook his head in dissapproval. I spoke of my research and told him it was about enlightenment. We began to say something about Meditation together. He then gave me what was the most cynical expression his face could ever conjure up, saying "it leads nowhere". I smiled. I wished some Buddhist or Zen techniques helped us connect things and take off from Patanjali Yoga. That would do so many people good. 6 years or so ago, my brother and I would have given that same cynical look to anyone seem...