Seminar Design

The New India series is a year-long seminar that explores the mechanisms by which the idea of "India" is produced and reproduced in the realm of what is broadly conveyed by the term "culture."  Incorporating both the lived practices of subalterns and the textual artifacts of those whose ideas and ideologies define the landscapes of modernity, we regard "culture" as those processes that play a role in cultivating the notion of a collective.  Culture describes the many practices that enable and expand, but also regulate and confine the self-fashioning of groups. Culture has multiple histories and ideologies:  it is simultaneously fluid and inert, consensual and contested, produced by those within the nation's boundaries and without, by those opposed to the state and aligned with it, in dialogue with and in diatribe against the structures of power.   Our notion of "culture" encompasses the multiplicity of Indias behind the putative new global identity. 

In short, during our first year we aim to ask what explains the form that India’s identity has taken and how it is projected and translated in different parts of the world, including in the United States.

In the last quarter century, modern India has defined much intellectual life in the US academy.  From the innovations of the Subaltern School of historians to the work of postcolonial critics, insights from India's colonial encounter have already profoundly influenced the manner in which disciplines such as history, anthropology, literature, geography, politics, philosophy, and sociology pursue their enterprises. Terms such as "agency," "culture," "power," and "subaltern," have been redefined by work in and around India, bringing with them new intellectual vistas.  Much of this work has focused almost exclusively on India's colonial past and its postcolonial aftermath.  Our seminar is an effort to redefine the study of India by recognizing that today's India is qualitatively reshaping itself and its environs by exporting new cultural and economic commodities that shape the world beyond.

The New India series will be an ongoing faculty research seminar structured around presentation of original research from a broadly humanistic perspective using widely interdisciplinary approaches.  Our goal is not to pursue a narrow area-studies agenda, but rather to examine the recent unfolding of one of the most exciting stories in the global economy in the context of broader scholarship at Temple and beyond.   We intend to publish an edited volume around our seminar theme and to have it in production by the second year of our seminar.