Historical Mediationism.pptx

ISEC Working Paper 471, 2020

Societies are a product of the diverse mediations that they go through in time. These mediations are not the same for every society. The concrete historical events and processes that are mediated over time determine the substance and form of a society. The West as we know it today has undergone definite economic, social, political and cultural mediations in its history. Consequently, it is today a product of these mediations. The developing /third world countries on the other hand have gone through their own events and processes in history. And their historical trajectory therefore determines their present condition. This trajectory, however, is not uniform for all societies. It is definitely specific to each society. The specificity of concrete historical mediations therefore determines what type of society has resulted from them. This is true even of different types of capitalism that evolve in different societal contexts. The theory of historical mediationism therefore directs us to look more and more for concrete historical events and processes that shaped the history of a place rather than rely on one broad general supra-historical theory that suits all places and all times. Historical mediationism therefore focuses on two aspects: The concrete historical processes that shaped a society and the diversity or similarity of the same between different societies. While this theory shifts the balance from a supra-historical theory of studying and understanding concrete history, it neither rejects nor strictly follows Marx. What is stressed therefore is historical specificity and diversity. In sum, this theory says that there is no reason to steamroll historical diversity to suit one particular straight jacket of a theory.

Ars Artium – An International Refereed Research Journal of English Studies and Culture, 2023

Despite 1000-year Muslim rule, India was never declared a theocratic or Islamic state. Muslim rulers allowed non-Muslims to lead their daily lives as per their religions and cultures. Communal harmony and Hindu-Muslim amity was the order of the day. This paper explores answers to questions such as: Was the state during Muslim rule declared as theocratic? To what extent the freedom of religion or religious tolerance was practised in medieval India? Were Hindus discriminated and excluded from imperial services by Muslim rulers? Whether Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam? In what way the art, music, architecture, and legal system developed in India because of these socio-cultural interactions? What is the nature of Hindu-Muslim relations in modern India? How and why these relations have been communalized in recent decades? What needs to be done to stem the deteriorating Hindu-Muslim divide and hatred towards each other. How can we invalidate Samuel P. Huntington's thesis that there will be civilizational or cultural war in India and India will be Hinduised? This paper argues that secular traditions of Indian society will get strengthened and revived by political and social forces in crafting future India.

104 and women. By distributing goods like rice and small loans, it could also reach out to a larger number of people than the DMK, which distributed patronage through land and jobs. This form of pro-poor populism was not always coherent with social pluralism, but the ADMK managed to reconcile these, through caste quotas, agrarian subsidies and its handling of trade unions. The author argues that, unlike in other parts of India, ethnicity in Tamil Nadu was not disruptive and violent, and explains this deviance in terms of the organ-isational and social pluralism of the Dravidian parties. The two types of populism had distinct consequences for social pluralism: if the assertive populism of the DMK gave greater cadre autonomy to its supporters, the paternalist populism of the ADMK made them more dependent on the party leader's patronage. However, in both cases, social pluralism and the increased representation of newly emerging groups encouraged stability, contained any potential for violent ethnic conflict, and also kept the forces of Hindu revivalism at bay. Tamil exceptionalism leads the author to argue that social forces such as these, which promote a tolerant conception of cultural identity, are better at combating violent religious revivalism than 'those that assert culturally vacuous notions of Indian citizenship' (p. 326). The onus of making ethnic forces more tolerant is placed on citizens committed to pluralist democracy, who should mobilise autonomously of states and parties, though still engaging with these. While the objective could not be worthier, there is a certain dissonance between the bulk of the book and its last few pages. The political universe of the book is Tamil Nadu, and its main actors are political parties. It is not easy to see how this otherwise compelling argument can be transposed onto the much larger, and more complex , political universe of the Indian nation. Moreover, transferring the initiative from the political parties to citizens is not something logically implied by the case study. Hence, while Subramanian's argument about tolerance being a more effective guarantor of ethnic peace than a pan-Indian notion of citizenship is unexceptionable, the route to an ethic of tolerance is less clear. Notwithstanding this, Subramanian's is a sophisticated and insightful book, which enriches the literature on political mobilisation in India.

2016

Introduction to Nakassis, Constantine V. 2016. Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The Dynamics of Conflict and Peace in Contemporary South Asia: The State, Democracy and Social Movements, 2020

Tatsuro Fujikura also discusses a situation in which a peace settlement failed to address the grievances of a party to the conflict. The chapter discusses the fate of the Tharuhat movement that demanded an ‘identity-based’ federal state in the western plains of Nepal. According to some of the contemporary political discourses in Nepal, ‘identity politics’, which has gained strong momentum after the conclusion of the armed conflict in 2006 and which threatened national integrity, has been defeated in recent years. After the promulgation of the new constitution in 2015 and with the conduct of local and federal elections, the key words seem to have shifted from ‘identity’ and ‘class’ to ‘stability’, ‘development’, and ‘prosperity’. Given this background, Fujikura focuses on some of the recent moments in the Tharuhat movement, including the Tikapur incident in August 2015, in which eight police officers were killed during a large demonstration, and the actions of some of the Tharu activists who now live under the new constitution which they once deemed so ‘unacceptable’ that they had to burn it. The chapter tries to appreciate what is at stake in the actions that the Tharu activists take in the context of a federal setup that they did not wish for. In trying to interpret Tharu activists’ attempts to insert their traditional institution of self-governance called barghar into the formal local governance system, Fujikura uses an expanded conception of ‘mediation’ as proposed by William Mazzarella (2006). This conception of mediation includes not only attempts to harmonize diverging interests but also, more broadly, social practices that reduce particularities of diverse experience and render them provisionally commensurable and communicable and, in doing so, become the basis of self-consciousness and desire.

When the Indian subcontinent was colonized, a complex process of labeling and conferring of identities was initiated by the colonial powers to control and to make sense of the huge mass of complexity facing them, where appearances, languages, and cultural traits seemed diverse and kaleidoscopic in nature. Yet contemporary ethnographic efforts to come into direct contact with such entities more often than not ends up in the realization that most of the so-called boundaries are ephemeral and often dissolve into nothingness, and people seem to have been moving, sharing, marrying, and absorbing each other and evolving identities that seem more dynamic than static and more situational than primordial. In anthropology, creation of boundaries had been reinforced by theoretical perspectives that were both engendered by and nurtured in corroboration of the colonial rule.

2015

When we think about mediation, we always look at it as an alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanism for ‘resolution of dispute’ or something closely connected with the ‘legal system’ or ‘administration of justice’. But when we analyse the process of mediation where the resolution of a conflict is sought to made in a consensual mode by addressing the underlying emotions that gave rise to it and sustained it, I am of the view that mediation has a health dimension attached to it more than the legal angle. As we know there is a direct link between diseases and stress or conflict and it is also true that emotions and state of mind have a powerful effect on physical as well as mental health. Similarly stress related diseases or health problems will not be cured just by peripheral medical treatment without diagnosing the root-cause that created it. By an effective mediation process, apart from resolving the problem, the cause of stress or problem also gets cured – resolving the proble...

Shodh Disha [ISSN 0975-735X] UGC Care Listed Journal, 2023

This paper in two sections elucidates upon how democracy enters a particular historical and socio-cultural setting and becomes ‘vernacularized’, and how through this process it produces new social relations and values which in turn shapes ‘the political.’ The First Section of the paper suc- cinctly puts conceptualization of power dynamics through the canons of Western Political Theory. The Second Section, then helps us re-imagine power dynamics in postcolonial democracies as an interplay of capital and social clout. Finally, in the Third Section, it brings back this discussion of power dynamics in postcolonial democracies into the heart of a fundamental problem in classical political theory i.e., the crisis of legitimation.

'The words justice and truth, amid a world that habitually neglects these things and utterly derides these words, are nevertheless among the very greatest powers the world contains' – Charles S. Peirce First, I wish to thank Saji Varghese for inviting me to make a contribution to the seminar on 'Conflict transformation and dharma of peace building: Contemporary relevance in northeast India'. In this paper, I take the purport of the Indian idea of dharma to be captured by the philosophical-social scientific idea of the cognitive order of society, which includes such concepts as justice and truth, as representing the infinite ideal limit of social life. 1 The following theses on conflict and conflict resolution assume the normative nature of these phenomena with a view to reflecting on their respective moral and ethical limits or parameters. Since such phenomena occur exclusively in the human social world, an adequate understanding of the latter is imperative from the very start if their relevant limits were to be identified in a way that illuminates them philosophically and social-scientifically as well as practically. It should be kept in mind, however, that since the normative social world additionally also has both an objective and subjective dimension, conflict and conflict resolution are more than merely normative phenomena. Conflict is a complex phenomenon that can assume either a negative or positive character. Seeing that this seminar takes the northeast Indian conflict situation as it empirical reference, the focus in this contribution is on the nature of negative conflict and its possible resolution, but it is of necessity simultaneously embedded in a broader set of reflections that take both the negative and positive types into account. After all, the possibility of conflict resolution and peace building implies that a conflict might turn out to have harboured positive potentials insofar as it contributed to transformation and change. A caveat applies, however. I cannot claim to be an expert on Indian affairs, but from recent reports by, among others, both Indian (Apoorvanand 2017) and Pakistani (Waheed 2017) writers I get the distinct sense that the conflict in different parts of northern India involving Hindu-Muslim and Indian-Pakistani relations has an overwhelming negative profile. The theoretical task is not just to develop an adequate understanding of such conflict, but simultaneously also to clarify the conditions for conflict resolution and thus peace building. 1 The multidimensional social world Beyond the one-dimensional positivist or empiricist conception obsessed with observational experience alone, it is typical in the phenomenological, hermeneutical and pragmatist approaches stressing in addition the experience of sign-borne meaning to understand the world of interpersonal and social relations as two-dimensional instead. The currently popular historicist and culturalist approaches likewise proceed from the same basic assumption. Stretching back to Hegel, many a philosopher and social scientist has offered an account of the social world as symbolically structured, where ordinary everyday orientations, actions, practices and social institutions and organizations are lent structure by a variety of symbolic structures or complexes. If, by contrast, a broader cognitively rather than simply symbolically structured view of the social world is adopted, one that takes into account the conditions of all experience whatsoever, as is done