Of Nomadology and India(n-ness)
Avishek Ray will explore how the dichotomy between the ‘good’ wanderer and the ‘bad’ wanderer in the ‘Indian tradition’ was premised upon a highly contingent process of religio-political partisanship and struggles over territorialisation. He will argue that the impulse to assume that nomadicity as a ‘radical’ practice articulating political dissidence and the figure of the ‘nomad’ as the prototype of a non-conformist, affective subject have perpetually existed in the ‘Indian’ cultural repertoire – for example, think of the nineteenth-century Orientalist claims on the origin of the Romani community, or for that matter, the Beats’ obsession with ‘India’ – is symbolic of an essentialist notion of ‘India’.
Date:
11 October 2016, 14:00 (Tuesday, 1st week, Michaelmas 2016)
Venue:
St Antony's College, 62 Woodstock Road OX2 6JF
Venue Details:
Fellows' Dining Room
Speakers:
Speaker to be announced
Organising department:
Asian Studies Centre
Organiser contact email address:
asian@sant.ox.ac.uk
Booking required?:
Not required
Cost:
None
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Maxime Dargaud-Fons
