NYU South Asia Fall 2020 Speaker Series: Sovereignty, Political Aesthetics, and the History of Capitalism

Introductions by Arvind Rajagopal with discussion and Q&A.  Register in advance for all these meetings: details and registration links below

Friday, October 16,12PM -1:30PM. Prathama Banerjee, “Kings, Jurists, Ascetics, Outcastes: Discontinuous Histories of Sovereignty in India.”  Here is a link to the NYU zoom recording of this Webinar (requires NYUZoom login). (Here is a link to downloaded recording files that should be available publicly.)

Friday, Oct 30, 12:00PM-1:30 pm: Sashikanth Ananthachari, Filmmaker. Vanavaasam [Living in the Forest]. Respondent: Richard Schechner, University Professor Emeritus, NYU, Editor, TDR (MIT Press). (HERE IS THE RECORDING)

Friday, Nov 13, 12:00-1:30 pm. Jairus Banaji: “A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism.” (HERE IS THE RECORDING)

Tues, Dec 1. Panel Discussion of Sudhir Chella Rajan’s new book,
A Social Theory of Corruption: Notes from the Subcontinent, with
Arjun Appadurai, Prasannan Parthasarathi, and Tanika Sarkar,
11:30am-1pm, Dec 1. (REGISTER AT THIS LINK)

Dec 4,  9:30-11:00, BOOK LAUNCH ROUNDTABLE. Jinee Lokaneeta (Drew University), The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence and Scientific Interrogations in India (Law, Meaning and Violence Series), University of Michigan Press, 2020. (REGISTER HERE)

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 October 16

Prathama Banerjee, “Kings, Jurists, Ascetics, Outcastes: Discontinuous Histories of Sovereignty in India.”

In this presentation, I look back, as a historian of modern south Asia, into the far past and ask: what does a deep history of sovereignty look like in this part of the world? I argue that the concept of sovereignty – as it evolved in medieval and early modern Europe and subsequently globalized via the work of colonialism and nationalism – does not quite capture the diverse and dispersed regimes of rule that south Asia experienced through the centuries. I propose that in south Asia, regimes of rule were constituted by an irresoluble dialectic between political power and social power, king and Brahmin, sultan and sharia, state law and caste/community law – in a way that unsettles the classical definition of sovereignty as the exclusive right of the ruler to institute and suspend law.  To understand political power here, therefore, we must attend to the social constitution as much as to the state. We must also acknowledge the centrality of what I call the ‘anti-social critique’, embodied in the figures of the king, the outcaste, the ascetic, the forest dweller and counter-intuitively the ‘ideal Brahmin’ himself, who by virtue of being outside society claimed a personalized form of sovereignty and immunity. 

Ambedkar famously said that Indian society is not a society at all, even if India might be a nation politically and culturally.  India is an agglomeration of castes and communities which operate in effect like polities unto themselves, with established borders in-between and no sociability whatsoever.  Hence sovereign power in India rests neither in the state nor in its symmetrical other, the autonomous rational individual of liberal thought.  It is dispersed across what I am calling for the moment ‘the social constitution’ (which is not exactly what we mean by the modern term ‘society’), and hence thwarts the standard social/political and state/society binaries of modern thought?

I end by briefly reflecting on the contemporary implications of this long history and the difficulties of breaching the periodization protocols of the historical discipline.
 
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Prathama Banerjee is a historian at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. She is the author of Politics of Time: ‘primitives’ and history-writing in a colonial society (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Elementary Aspects of the Political: histories from the global south (Duke University Press, 2020, forthcoming).  Her interests lie in the history of ideas, cultural history, literary studies and increasingly contemporary democracy.

October 30

12:00-1:30 Sashikanth Ananthachari, Filmmaker. Vanavaasam [Living in the Forest]Respondent: Richard Schechner, University Professor Emeritus, NYU, Editor, TDR (MIT Press).

Advanced registration is required: https://nyu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUldOihrzMqGtWeG81toQUH9lWpd3GqoSZb

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

For over a thousand years a theatre festival has been performed in Tamil Nadu and Andhra, totally outside any institutional religious, corporate or state support.  This unique festival easily might be the longest standing, independent theatre festival in the world surviving currently. The festival has been funded purely by individual contributions of each family in the community and its primary objective seems to be to create inclusive communities of belonging. For over a decade Sashikanth has been making a series of films on this festival, listed below. He will show excerpts and discuss this work.

Sashikanth Ananthachari (https://kelaidraupadai.wordpress.com/ ) is a cinematographer/filmmaker trained in the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India, Pune and has shot over 300 documentaries and 6 fiction feature films with leading Indian filmmakers. His films have won both National and International recognition. Currently he is working on his ‘Epic Performance Traditions’  project which consists of a trilogy of films- ‘Kelai Draupadai’ [Listen Draupadi], ‘Ninaivin Nagaram’ [Landscape and Memory] ‘Kalpavaasi [Textures of Time] and a book ‘Mahabharata of the Mind’ which engages with the theory of Indian theatrical forms. Kelai Draupadai, the first film of the work in progress trilogy was the official selection at the BlowUp Chicago Arthouse Film Festival[2016]. It was awarded ‘The Best Foreign Film at the DIY Film Festival. Los Angeles in 2016.

Nov 13

12:00-1:30 pm. Jairus Banaji: A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism. [A presentation based in his new book (here is NYU Bobst Link), A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism. Haymarket, 2020.

This presentation will be based on his new book, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (Haymarket, 2020). Jairus Banaji’s many publications include Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, in the Brill Historical Materialism Book Series (2010), winner of the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize, which he discusses with his other work in an interview with Félix Boggio Éwanjée-Épée and Frédéric Monferrand (in Historical Materialism): “Towards a New Marxist Historiography.” 

REGISTER FOR THIS MEETING AT THIS LINK

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Spanning centuries and continents, this new book by Jairus Banaji fundamentally reconfigures our view of the rise of capitalism on the world stage.

The rise of capitalism to global dominance is still largely associated – by both laypeople and Marxist historians – with the industrial capitalism that made its decisive breakthrough in 18th century Britain. Jairus Banaji’s new work reaches back centuries and traverses vast distances to argue that this leap was preceded by a long era of distinct “commercial capitalism”, which reorganised labor and production on a world scale to a degree hitherto rarely appreciated.

Rather than a picture centred solely on Europe, we enter a diverse and vibrant world. Banaji reveals the cantons of Muslim merchants trading in Guangzhou since the eighth century, the 3,000 European traders recorded in Alexandria in 1216, the Genoese, Venetians and Spanish Jews battling for commercial dominance of Constantinople and later Istanbul. We are left with a rich and global portrait of a world constantly in motion, tied together and increasingly dominated by a pre-industrial capitalism. The rise of Europe to world domination, in this view, has nothing to do with any unique genius, but rather a distinct fusion of commercial capitalism with state power.

DEC 1

11:30am-1pm. GLOBAL ASIA and South Asia@NYU invite you to a panel discussion of Sudhir Chella Rajan’s new book, A Social Theory of Corruption: Notes from the Subcontinent (Harvard, 2020). with responses from Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor, Media Studies, NYU; Prasannan Parthasarathi, Professor of History, Boston College; and Tanika Sarkar, Professor of History, JNU (Retd).  with the author responding.

Sudhir Chella Rajan teaches political theory and environmental policy at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. The author of The Enigma of Automobility: Democratic Politics and Pollution Control, he was previously Senior Fellow at the Tellus Institute

Register for this meeting at this link: After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

DEC 4

FRIDAY DEC 4,  Dec 9:30-11:00, BOOK LAUNCH ROUNDTABLE. Jinee Lokaneeta (Drew University), The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence and Scientific Interrogations in India (Law, Meaning and Violence Series), University of Michigan Press, 2020.

The Truth Machines explores the workings of law, science, and policing in the everyday context to generate a theory of state power and legal violence, challenging the monolithic frameworks about this relationship. Based on cases and interviews with lawyers, police, and forensic psychologies in five Indian cities, Lokaneeta provides insights into a police institution that is founded and refounded in its everyday interactions between state and non-state actors. The postcolonial Indian police have often been accused of using torture in both routine and exceptional criminal cases, but they, and forensic psychologists, have claimed that lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis (the use of “truth serum,” Sodium Pentothal) represent a paradigm shift away from physical torture; most state high courts in India have upheld this rationale. Attention to truth machines reveals the texture of violence experienced by certain sections of the population, even under the rule of law, especially in terror related cases. Jinee Lokaneeta argues that the attempt to replace physical torture with truth machines in India fails because it relies on a confessional paradigm that is contiguous with torture. Theorizing a concept of Contingent State, this book demonstrates the disaggregated, and decentered nature of state power and legal violence, creating possible sites of critique and intervention.