Sankaran Krishna

Cartographic Anxiety: Mapping the Body Politic in India:

The parliamentary elections of May 1991 in India were disrupted by the assassination of the former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi. In the aftermath of this event, one of the ubiquitous election posters of the Congress (I) party showed a picture of Rajiv Gandhis identity card.1 On the identity card, the space allocated for designation of religion was filled by the word Indian. The not-so-subtle implication was that the slain leader had, in his lifetime, transcended divisive societal identities such as Hindu or Muslim and defined himself primarily as a secular citizen of a nation-state.2

The Importance of Being Ironic: A Postcolonial View on Critical International Relations Theory

In oppositions such as meaning/form, soul/body, intuition/ expression, literal/metaphorical, nature/culture, intelligible/ sensible, positive/negative, transcendental/empirical, serious/ nonserious, the superior term belongs to the logos and is a higher presence; the inferior term marks a fall. Logocentrism thus assumes the priority of the first term and conceives the second in relation to it, as a complication, a negation, a manifestation, a disruption of the first.1

Oppressive pasts and desired futures: Re-imagining India

Abstract Univocal notions of sovereign nationality have reached a dead-end in the Indian subcontinent. The fixation of state elites in preserving national security and the territorial integrity of their countries has unleased a spiral of state and societal violence that is unparallelled even in the subcontinent. This fixation with such exclusivist notions of nationality and sovereignty has its origins in a particular rendering of past Indian history. This interpretation of the past has also locked the dominant vision of the future in directions that can only compound the violence. Re-imagining the future thus involves re-creating the past in more enabling ways. Perhaps the time has come to traverse paths not taken and explore alternatives that were sidelined in the tumultous times of partition and independence in 1947.

India and Sri Lanka: A fatal convergence

Abstract Indias decision to intervene militarily in the Sri Lankan civil war was preceded by two significant historical developments: (1) the emergence of a strong Sinhala ethnic identity in Sri Lanka, often accompanied by the explicit marginalization and suppression of the Tamil minority in that country; and (2) an emerging foreign policy of regional hegemony in New Delhi. Together, these two developments have moved inexorably towards a fatal convergence across the Palk Straits. Tragically, there appear to be no easy solutions to such conflicts in the Indian subcontinent: they seem to be the inevitable by‐products of the very effort to imagine and construct nation‐states.

Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Destitution Law, Race, and Human Security

A powerful new wave of alienating land from those who live on it is sweeping the global commons, and discourses such as “Emerging Economies” and “Brazil, Russia, India, China” are the ideological mediators of this wave. In India, the “slow violence” of the Nehruvian decades has been replaced by the accelerated pace of such processes under a neoliberal dispensation. In both periods, the overwhelming costs of “development” have been preponderantly visited upon Dalits, tribals, and landless laborers. Colonial laws regarding land acquisition and Eminent Domain have been an important legacy for the postcolonial state in its efforts to acquire land for private capital. They have intersected with notions of race and caste within the habitus of the Indian middle class, whose efforts to make the nation are simultaneously the unmaking of various subaltern groups and classes. Yet, as the struggle between the multinational Vedanta Corporation and a tribal group called the Dongaria Kondh in the Niyamgiri Hills of Odisha in southeastern India demonstrates, the outcomes are by no means a foregone conclusion.

Partition: On the Discriminations of Modernity

A couple of years after the Partition of the country, it occurred to the respective governments of India and Pakistan that inmates of lunatic asylums, like prisoners, should also be exchanged. Muslim lunatics in India should be transferred to Pakistan and Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani asylums should be sent to India.

Producing Sri Lanka: J. R. Jayewardene and Postcolonial Identity

If history is a detour between two presences, an original state and a telos, one wonders if the postcolony is best defined in terms of the spuriousness of both these social constructions: our origins and our desired telos. After all, what we know of “our” (South Asian) history is inflected with the uncomfortable knowledge that it required the midwives of the East India Company (in the form of the orientalists) to awaken us to those glories. And, further, even as we have collectively willed ourselves to embark on a journey called “the nation in the making,” we realize that while “they” seem to wear their nationality with a degree of unreflective panache, “we” feel the need to reiterate shrilly the fact of our arrival as nations. Along some register of authenticity, our present is vexed because we recognize the mimicry inherent in our understandings of both past and future.* In this eternally suspended state of being, between the postcolony and the not-yet-nation, political rhetoric continually attempts to fashion enabling origins and destinations. This article attempts to analyze the self-fashioning narratives in the rhetoric of Junius Richard Jayewardene, Sri Lanka’s president from 1977 to 1988. Jayewardene’s rhetoric may be seen as spanning a past that began with the consecration of Sri Lanka by the Buddha and a future that would see it as a glittering, dynamic, and entrepreneurial node in the circuits of world capitalism: an ersatz Singapore, if you will.

Number Fetish: Middle-class India's Obsession with the GDP

Abstract India has been fixated on the annual growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This number averaged about 3.5% per annum from independence to the early 1980s, leaped to twice that in recent decades before falling off in the last five years to about 5% per annum. The GDP emerged at a specific moment in the evolution of capitalism and was never intended to be a measure of the quality of life of people. Gross Domestic Product discussions reveal a desperate desire on the part of many in India to be seen as having arrived into the first world. In a context marked by the paradox of electoral democracy alongside mass poverty and rising inequality, focusing on the GDP legitimizes an unjust social order. The GDP number seeks to transform politics in a technical and asocial direction, and the obsession with it powerfully undergirds the hegemony of a neoliberal vision of India.

Notes on the Dramatic Career of a Concept The Middle Class, Democracy, and the Anthropocene

The global middle class is frequently seen as a guarantor of democracy and its consumerism the basis for the next wave of growth in the world economy. This article questions both premises and suggests that middle classes are frequently the creation of state projects based on selective inclusions and exclusions, and their desired futures constitute a real threat to planetary sustainability at this point in time.