The School of Social Sciences, University of Hyderabad, organised a three-day conference titled ‘Golden Always’, from 9th to 11th of January, 2025, in Zakir Hussain Lecture Complex, bringing a year of academic reflections through the Golden Jubilee Lecture Series to an end. The introductory words of Prof. K K Kailash (convenor and Head of Department, Political Science), Dean, School of Social Sciences, Prof. Jyotirmaya Sharma, IOE Director Prof. Ghanshyam Krishna and the VC, Prof. BJ Rao set the tone for the rest of conference, reminding everyone that Golden Always is not simply a reflection on the past but also a commitment to the future. Prof. Krishna thanked the Dean for pioneering an academic way of celebrating Golden Jubilee. Prof. Rao, applauding the diversity of themes chosen for the conference, urged the students to ‘engage and interact’ with the speakers, and ‘challenge’ the ideas thrown at them. These words were recalled by almost every speaker, and were justified by the confident and inquisitive questions asked by the audience at the end of all sessions. Teeming with intellectuals like Ajay Skaria, Akshaya Mukul, Avi Lifschitz, Chinmay Tumbe, Georgios Varouxakis, Gurpreet Mahajan, Huzaifa Omair Siddiqi, Manoj Mitta, Rukmini S, Suryakant Waghmore, Swargajyoti Gohain, Uday Chandra, Urvashi Butalia, V Geetha and Zaad Mahmood, these three days witnessed a prolific, enthused and diverse academic exchange between the scholars and students.

The conference had an overall methodological bent, and focused on the question of ‘writing’- four discussion panels being ‘Writing Politics’, ‘Writing History’, ‘Writing Society’ and ‘Writing Identity’. These were interspersed with four distinguished lectures. The first day witnessed a key-note address by Prof. Gurpreet Mahajan who taught at Centre for Political Studies, JNU and authored several notable works. She brought her years of experience to the podium, providing an overarching frame which other speakers could recall and rework. In her talk, titled ‘Methodological unity of the Human Sciences: Reading texts and contexts’, she argued that despite disciplinary imperatives of specification and differentiation, a unity of method permeated by a sensitivity towards historical and geographical contexts, is essential to inculcate. Contexts themselves are layered, spanning from an individual, his or her social world, to the core ideas that animate a historical epoch. All texts (including events, institutions and phenomena) inhabit this three-fold context, and the task before the scholarship is to unmask these layers diligently and ceaselessly, in full awareness that a perfected, ‘total’ context is unrealizable. Prof. Mahajan emphasised historical ‘change’, urging the scholars to discover discontinuities and dissimilarities that undergird apparent, often deceptive, resemblances. Only a tapestry of spatial and historical conversations, she argued, can offer us a way out of de-historicized ‘essences’ and ‘absolute differences’, thus ending with an appeal for ‘global conversations.’

The second part of the day was earmarked for ‘Writing Politics’. The panel, chaired by Prof. Sharma, included Avi Lifschitz, Chinmay Tumbe, Rukmini S and Suryakant Waghmore. Rukmini opened the session with a brief discussion of her work in Data Journalism, and her book ‘Whole Numbers and Half Truths’ that dispels many ‘common-sense’ narratives about Indian state and democracy. She underlined the need for tapping into India’s statistical architecture and highlighted the procedural loopholes and limits of surveys. Chinmay Tumbe, whose ‘India Moving’ and ‘The Age of Pandemics’ were critically acclaimed, reflected on the contrast between nativist political rhetorics and the demographic necessities of accepting migration. This, he concluded, shall foster the ideological battles of twenty first century- between ‘multiculturalism and nativism’. His concluding insight in the book, that Gandhi versus Thackeray should yield to Ambedkar, was deftly used by Prof. Sharma to bring Prof. Suryakant Waghmore into the conversation, whose book ‘Civility against Caste’ made the case that India suffers from high democracy and low civility. Following his masterly exposition of Hindu Politeness, Hindu Cosmopolitanism, and the question of caste, Avi Lifschitz gave the audience a brief glimpse of the world of Enlightened Despots and eighteenth-century intellectuals, with Frederick the Great as his anchor. The session ended with an engaging round of questions followed by tea, snacks and continued conversations.

The second day began with a panel discussion on Writing History, followed by a special lecture by Prof. Avi Lifschitz and ending with a discussion on Writing Society. The ‘Writing History’ panel, chaired by Prof. Suchandra Ghosh, Department of History, included stalwarts like Akshaya Mukul, celebrated author of ‘Gita Press and the making of Modern India’ and a biography of S. H. V. Ajnyeya, Prof. Georgios Varouxakis from Queen Mary University, UK, Huzaifa Omair Siddiqui who teaches at Ashoka University, and V Geetha, a feminist historian, publisher, translator and writer. The discussion veered from challenges of verifiability in an age of digitalization to the entangled dynamics of textbooks, politics and power. Prof. Varouxakis emphasised the need to adapt to technology, even inside the classrooms. Prof. Huzaifa expressed concern that technology, besides promoting artificial and impersonal thinking, lacks subjectivity and solid epistemological grounding. V Geetha voiced the need for contextualization and pluralization of historical memory, by re-imagining archives and recovering the marginalized voices. The discussion concluded with panelists’ remarks on writing histories of dissent and resistance, which Mukul saw as an ethical cum intellectual position, mired in commemorative aspects of collective memory.

Following this, Prof. Avi’s lecture took the audience into the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ and Frederick the Great. He challenged the view that Enlightenment thinkers were enamored with ‘sovereignty of Reason’, and demonstrated how ‘finitude’ of human capacity was conceded in both epistemic as well as socio-political realms by many of them. Thinkers were divided on need for diffusion of truth on one hand, and necessity of prejudice on another. Frederick II, an ‘enlightened despot’ who allowed his interlocuters to challenge his intellectual positions and actively participated in philosophical debates of the times, is an important figure for intellectual history, but was marginalized because historians largely considered his ‘tolerance’ a charade or an instrumental, rather than a substantial, position. Prof. Avi argued that allegations of discontinuity in Frederick’s early liberal and later conservative positions are misleading. In fact, he stayed true to the epistemic humility of early Enlightenment, evident in Voltaire’s belief in a gradual, trickle-down diffusion of Truth. This was initially a strategic as well as a radical position that appeared conservative in nineteenth century. This admission of ‘irrationality’ of human motivations has resurfaced after the works of Walzer, Nussbaum and others. Prof. Avi’s dexterous handling of archive made a deep impression on the students and researchers. The chair, Ajailiu Niumai, ended the session by thanking the speaker and summarizing his arguments.

After a break, the conference reconvened to discuss ‘Writing Society’, with panelists Ajay Skaria – author of ‘Hybrid Histories’ and ‘Unconditional Equality’, Manoj Mitta, who authored ‘Caste Pride’, Uday Chandra, from Georgetown University, Qatar and author of ‘Resistance as Negotiation’ and Zaad Mohammad from Presidency University, Kolkata who works on political economy, labor and electoral politics. It was chaired by Prof. Aparna Rayaprol, Department of Sociology, who initiated the discussion by asking panelists about their own particular as writers. Prof. Skaria mentioned his affinity with writing, beginning with journalism and an accidental entry into academia, expressing his difficulties in reconciling academic writing with the urgency of activism. Manoj Mitta, a Delhi-based journalist, reminisced how very immediate events, like the riots of 1984, and caste violence, especially cases where initial sentences on perpetrators were reversed by High Courts, pushed him towards writing. Uday Chandra emphasized an ‘epistemic of listening’ in a world where information is pervasive. Zaad Mohammad reflected on his early days of activism and writing pamphlets, while steering the discussion towards the importance of intended ‘audience’. The session ended with an enthused discussion on the significance of location- of the audience, the subject, as well as the author- in ‘writing’ society.

The first session of the third day was a special lecture delivered by Prof. Skaria and chaired by Prof. Bhangya Bhukya, Department of History, who recalled how Skaria’s Hybrid Histories, along with David Hardiman’s ‘Coming of the Devi’, had pushed a whole generation of budding scholars towards subaltern and marginalized histories. Prof. Skaria began his talk with a historical retrospect of his book after 25 years. At the outset, he distinguished ‘exploitation’ from ‘oppression’. Former reduces the exploited to a ‘what’ while oppression is a violence of ‘who’, of ‘existential identities’ and denial of dignity. While the New Social Movements were conscious of this duality, Hindutva separates the two in order to give a ‘face’ to oppression. Thus, populism is conceptually distinct from the subaltern project. ‘Subaltern intimation of freedom’, the speaker argued, is different from liberal emancipation that continues to reproduce subalternity. The very conception of subaltern and subordination requires one to first think of freedom. He then recalled Walter Benjamin to argue that subaltern intimation of freedom belongs to ‘Divine’ or Messianic time where ‘justice without power’ is conceivable. Subaltern resistance must be studied with an eye to this futurity which exists within present as well, probably in that very act of resistance. The audience asked several questions around ‘structured dominance’, forms of agency, and contemporaneity of subaltern project, leading to a fruitful discussion.

The panel on ‘writing identities’ that followed, included Prof. Gurpreet Mahajan, Prof. Swargajyoti Gohain from Ashoka University, Urvashi Butalia, and V. Geetha, with Prof. Uday Chandra as Chair. Urvashi Butalia and V. Geetha, both made a case for ‘self-reflexivity’ or awareness of one’s own privileged position, in writing about identities. Urvashi highlighted the complexity of intersectionality in approaching the question of identity by recalling the example of a hijra woman Mona Ahmed. Swargajyoti Gohain mentioned how (ethnic) identity became her entry-point into academia, arguing that the questions of borders, boundaries, religion and even ecology cannot be adequately dealt without a sustained engagement with the complex layers of identity. Prof. Mahajan dwell on the relationship between identity and thinking, noting the duality of ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ identities. V Geetha took up this strand, mentioning that her writing itself emerged from the collective thought of the feminist movement.

The final session- the valedictory address by Prof. Varouxakis- was a masterclass in methodological aspects of doing intellectual history, thus bringing the conference that began with Prof. Mahajan’s keynote, to a full circle. His research on the genealogical history of ‘West’ as a concept dispels the notion that West was a Greko-Roman legacy, or even an imperial ideological invention. The first reference to West was made by Comte, who was in fact an anti-imperial thinker, which was later put to multiple uses. It emerged from a need to otherize some parts of Europe itself. A thoroughly engaging discussion followed, and the conference came to an end with the concluding remarks by Prof. Kailash, who expressed his gratitude to the speakers for accepting the invitation and sharing their views, the Dean, the heads and faculty, the IOE and VC, administrative staff, an energetic team of volunteers, and the audience who made the conference successful. The conference succeeded in foregrounding the complexities of ‘writing’ and methodology. The panels were designed in a way to bring academicians and non-academic authors in conversation with each other, providing students with a kaleidoscopic diversity of perspectives.

 

 

 

Rapporteurs:

Alice (Centre for Women’s Studies)

Anamika Das (Dept. of Sociology)

Debankita Das (Dept. of History)

Himani (Dept. of History)

Rajat Pratap (Dept. of Political Science)