Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives PDF
Preview Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives
VIOLENCE IN SOUTH ASIA This volume explores new perspectives on contemporary forms of violence in South Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and case studies, it examines the infiltration of violence at the societal level and affords a comparative regional analysis of its historical, cultural and geopolitical origins in South Asia. Featuring essays from Sri Lanka to Nepal, and from Afghanistan to Burma, it sheds light on issues as wide-ranging as lynching and mob justice, hate speech, caste violence, gender-based violence and the plight of the Rohingyas, among others. Lucid and engaging, this book will be an invaluable source of reference as well as scholarship to students and researchers of postcolonial studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural geography, minority studies, politics and gender studies. Pavan Kumar Malreddy is a researcher in English literature at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. He previously taught at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and TU Chemnitz, Germany. His publications include Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism (2015) and the co-edited collection Reworking Postcolonialism (2015). He has co-edited special issues with the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2012; 2020), ZAA: Journal of English and American Studies (2014), Kairos and the European Journal of English Studies (2018), and has authored essays on terrorism, political violence and postcolonial theory in The European Legacy, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Intertexts, among others. Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha is Professor at the Department of English, Kazi Nazrul University, India. He was Fulbright Nehru Fellow 2018–19 at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research focuses on postcolonial governmentality, citizenship rights, political violence and the Anthropocene. His work appeared in International Journal of Zizek Studies, Parallax, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, History and Sociology of South Asia, Postcolonial Studies, Transnational Literature and Economic and Political Weekly, among others. He is co-editor of Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium and is one of the founding members of the Postcolonial Studies Association of the Global South (PSAGS). Birte Heidemann is Assistant Professor in English literature at Dresden University of Technology, Germany. She previously held appointments at TU Chemnitz and University of Bremen, Germany. Her research interests include postcolonial theory, and literary and cultural expressions of post-conflict societies. She is the author of Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature (2016) and co-editor of From Popular Goethe to Global Pop (2013), Reworking Postcolonialism (2015) and two special editions of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Wasafiri and Postcolonial Text, among others. “The strength of the book lies with its innovative conceptualisation and carefully selected chapters, which are based on original material and ethnographic studies. The volume captures the pulse of many contemporary issues being debated in India, such as Maoist politics, incidents of lynching, new developments in Kashmir and recent incidents of rape.” – Ajay Gudavarthy, Jawaharlal Nehru University “Whether there is more violence in South Asia today or whether it is just more vis- ible, one cannot turn a page of a newspaper from the region without being struck by words like ‘lynching’, ‘surgical strike’, ‘cow vigilantes’, along with the older ‘riot’, ‘acid attack’, ‘murder’, ‘rape’ etc. Hence, this book is an absolutely necessary and very important scholarly intervention in South Asian literary and cultural studies.” – Tabish Khair, Aarhus University VIOLENCE IN SOUTH ASIA Contemporary Perspectives Edited by Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha and Birte Heidemann First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha and Birte Heidemann; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha and Birte Heidemann to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-13511-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-32132-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-31684-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC CONTENTS List of contributors viii Acknowledgements x 1 Introduction: genealogies of violence in South Asia 1 Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha and Birte Heidemann PART I Structural violence: ideologies, hierarchies and symbolic acts 21 2 Neither war nor peace: political order and post-conflict violence in Nepal 23 Julia Strasheim 3 Caste violence: free speech or atrocity? 37 K. Satyanarayana 4 The representational burden of ethno-nationalist violence in Sri Lanka 52 Harshana Rambukwella 5 Mapping extraordinary measures: militarisation and political resistance in Kashmir 67 Mohammed Sirajuddeen vi Contents PART II Gendered violence: rape, misogyny and feminist discourse 81 6 Sex, rape, representation: cultures of sexual violence in contemporary India 83 Karen Gabriel 7 Biographies of violence and the violence of biographies: writing about rape in Pakistan 100 Shazia Sadaf 8 Violence in public spaces: security and agency of women in West Bengal 115 Sanchali Sarkar PART III Outsourced violence: mobs, insurgents and private armies 125 9 Violence and perilous trans-borderal journeys: the Rohingyas as the nowhere-nation precariat 127 Mursed Alam 10 India’s lynchings: ordinary crimes, rough justice or command hate crimes? 144 Harsh Mander 11 Violence, neoliberal state and the dispossession of adivasis in Central India 160 Ashok Kumbamu PART IV Cultures of violence: fractured histories, fissured communities 175 12 Afghanistan: military occupation, violence and ethnocracy 177 Wahid Razi and James Goodman 13 Social roots of insurgency in Kashmir 192 Idreas Khandy Contents vii 14 Islamist attacks against secular bloggers in Bangladesh 209 Ryan Shaffer 15 Democratic voice and the paradox of Nepal bandhas 224 Sally Carlton Index 238 CONTRIBUTORS Mursed Alam is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Gour College, Uni- versity of Gour Banga, India. His areas of research include subaltern life and politics, Islamic traditions in South Asia and the literary and cultural history of Bengali Muslims. Sally Carlton is based in Christchurch, New Zealand, and works for Citizens Advice Bureau providing settlement support to new migrants. Previously, she was a Research Fellow through the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development pro- gramme in Nepal working on the country’s troubled post-conflict present. Karen Gabriel is Associate Professor and Head of the English Department at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, India. She has published extensively on issues of gender, sexuality, cinema, melodrama and the nation-state, including Melo- drama and the Nation: Sexual Economies of Bombay Cinema 1970–2000 (2010). James Goodman is Professor in the Social and Political Sciences at the Univer- sity of Technology Sydney, Australia. He currently researches issues of global and climate justice and is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies (forthcoming). Idreas Khandy is a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University, UK. His research focuses on nationalism of nations without states and incorporates an interdisciplinary approach to understand why nationalism continues to hold emancipatory promise. Ashok Kumbamu is Assistant Professor of Biomedical Ethics at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, USA. His research and teaching interests include critical development studies, agrarian studies, social movements, environmental sociology and the sociol- ogy of health and medicine. Contributors ix Harsh Mander is a human rights and peace worker, writer, researcher and teacher who works with survivors of mass violence and hunger, homeless persons and street children. He convenes and edits the India Exclusion Report. His latest publication is Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India (2019). Harshana Rambukwella is Director of the Postgraduate Institute of English, Open University of Sri Lanka. He is the author of Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cul- tural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism (2018) and currently holds the Sri Lanka Chair, University of Heidelberg, Germany. Wahid Razi is lecturer and researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. His work focuses on various issues in sociology and includes other fields in social sciences such as politics, political sociology, history, anthropology and law. Shazia Sadaf teaches Human Rights and Social Justice at the Institute of Inter- disciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. She has published in various journals, including Interventions and ARIEL. Sanchali Sarkar is a researcher based in Kolkata, India. She was awarded the AUFF PhD Screening Grant in 2018 to work at the Department of Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her perspective doctoral project concerns intersec- tional feminist politics and mobility rights in India. K. Satyanarayana is Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. His most recent publications are the co-edited volumes Dalit Studies (2016) and Dalit Text: Politics and Aesthetics Re- imagined (2019). Ryan Shaffer is a writer and historian whose work focuses on Asian and European history, with particular interest in extremism and political violence. He is the author of Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism (2017). Mohammed Sirajuddeen holds a PhD from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawa- harlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He visited the Palestine Territories, Israel, the Kashmir Valley, Bastar, Germany, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates for research assignments. Julia Strasheim is a researcher at the Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Founda- tion and research associate at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Stud- ies, Hamburg, Germany. Her work on post-conflict peace processes appeared in the Journal of Peace Research, Democratization and Cooperation and Conflict, among others.
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