CSDS, Seminar Room. Times are IST (India Standard Time)
Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI)
ICLS; Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape (South Africa); Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (Delhi); Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Study, Tsinghua University (Beijing)
Please note that the Global Institute “Global Racisms” events are closed to the public.
In his Pakistan or the Partition of India (1945), Ambedkar approvingly cites Ernest Renan’s proposition about the necessity of forgetfulness for building national unity. Since both Hindus and Muslims cling to memories of past hostilities and war, such unity, Ambedkar suggests, might be difficult to achieve in India. But while in this case Ambedkar seems to argue for the necessity of historical forgetting, in his astonishing 1947 text on the Shudras, he makes a painstaking and passionate case for precisely an un-forgetting—for excavating an ancient history of war and hostility that has been covered over by a calcified, opaque and apparently indestructible system of oppression. This paper presents a preliminary attempt to think about the relation between memory and war in Ambedkar’s work by reading his work together with that of Nicole Loraux, who, at the conclusion of her monumental book on stasis, memory, and forgetting in ancient Athens (1997), turns to the 1940s and makes a plea for what she calls the “slow work of mourning” involving not facile commemoration or distancing, but the incorporation of a conflictual past.
Such incorporation seems almost impossible today, when, confronted with a brazen genocidal massacre in Palestine, not only governments but also educational institutions in most parts of the world seem intent on a forgetting of all historical context, an erasure of the political, and a forceful fortification of ideological binaries generated to serve colonial capital. What can a slow, wakeful return to Ambedkar’s and Loraux’s work bring today to our attention? How should we read Ambedkar’s texts on early India? My hypothesis is that these texts become most productive and potent when they are read, not simply as possible accounts of empirical history, but instead as inventive and powerful “myths” that allow us to make sense of something intractable in the present; that enable us to see how, in the words of the psychoanalytic thinker Joan Copjec, “every phenomenal field occludes its cause.”
Simona Sawhney teaches in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian 6 PM Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her research and teaching interests include Indian literature, modern political thought, and feminist thought. She is the author of The Modernity of Sanskrit (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and has been a senior co-editor of the journal Cultural Critique (University of Minnesota Press) for about a decade.
