The Department of Political Science held a talk on Questions of Identity in Modern Indian Political Thought: Reading Savarkar, Gandhi and Ambedkar on September 18th 2024. The Speaker was Dr. Jadumani Mahanand who teaches at the Law School, O.P. Jindal University. Dr Mahanand is an alumnus of the Department. He obtained his M.A and M. Phil degrees in Political Science from the University of Hyderabad. Dr Anagha Ingole acted as discussant for the lecture.
The talk was attempting to speak to the question of identity and its sought resolutions as they present themselves in the academia. It identified two major strands. One in which a professional academic view, mostly emanating in the works of Indian scholars based in the global north looks at the question of Indian identity as one of anti-colonial or post-colonial nature. It may be argued that Gandhi is used predominantly as a source of teasing out these standard positions. On the other hand, within contemporary India, non-academic but politically charged popular writings have championed the need to look at Indian identity as one that needs decolonising; a view voiced in varying forms of articulations and symbolic actions of the ruling party.
In this strand, decolonising is often understood as retrieving a pre-colonial homogenous identity whose construction in fact can be traced to the nationalist project of Savarkar rather than in the pre-colonial period. The speaker tried to probe what would an inquiry into identity look like if the primary opposition against which one was theorising identity was not colonialism but Brahmanism- both in its pre-colonial and post-colonial renditions. Reading Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste in order to tease out sources of such an identity was proposed as a possible way to do this.
Important as the question is, the discussion that followed tried to seek clarifications on whether such a conception of identity is not limited to what one would call ‘political identity’ and what expansion one must bring to that term as it is worked upon in these three thinkers, if not in the larger Indian tradition. The discussion also problematised the naming exercises of political thought of certain period as ‘modern’ or ‘ancient’ and how that may pre-determine both interpretation and assume motivations that might not exist in the first place. Questions over moving away from the standard texts of the canon and the interpretation of liberalism in India which remains an uncomfortable and unanswered question were also raised and discussed.
Ms. Gopi Tejaswi (MA, IIIrd Semester) introduced the speaker and Mr. Pradeep Kumar Gautam (MA IIIrd Semester) proposed the vote of thanks. The lecture was attended by research scholars, students and faculty from the School of Social Sciences.
Contributor: The Office, Department of Political Science