Abstract:The Partition of India in 1947 that resulted in the death and displacement of millions of people continues to inhabit the cognizance of the people of South Asia as a historical phenomenon laden with violence. Although the bequest of the Partition is palpable in episodes of religious tension, discourses on minority belonging, secularism, nation and nationalism in India, critical exploration of the phenomenon as a tension-ridden historical episode has largely been restricted.
Abstract: Fear is one of the primary emotions and state of psychological being which affects the physical existence of human being. Literature dealing with holocaust, partition or physicalviolence also highlights the dimension of fear. Victims are always under the siege of psychological trauma that devastates their human existence.
Abstract: The 'discovery' of torture and its prevalence in the extraction of confessions produced a dilemma for the colonial state in India. Especially with the publication of the two-volume Report of the Commissioners for the Investigation of Alleged Cases of Torture in the Madras Presidency in 1855, colonial administrators became uncomfortably aware of the contrived nature of the 'truth' produced before magistrates and the police.
Abstract: As the supreme leader of the Indian national movement for freedom, the success of which in 1947 set off a whole wave of decolonization in the rest of the British Empire, M. K. Gandhi may be thought to have a claim to be regarded as the Father of the Postcolonial. However, the founding figures of postcolonial discourse have hardly taken any note of him, and there is a deafening silence on Gandhi in the various readers, encyclopedias and companions on the subject.
Abstract: This essay argues that aesthetic approaches to studying politics can allow us to read politics in more nuanced ways. Through the study of murals and statues in the Indian parliament, it is suggested that the politics of art and the art of politics are conjoined. In particular, the essay examines the ways in which the postcolonial Indian state reproduces the discourse of nationalism and modernity through its production of a nationalist aesthetic and how the consumption of this aesthetics results in struggles over meaning-making and its legitimacy.
Abstract: The colonial archives are filled with documents detailing incidents of arson, beatings, shootings, robberies and harassment that occurred along the contours of the numerous borders that separated French India from India following the departure of the British in 1947. The framing of these years as a period of terror wrought by “goondas” covered an underlying anxiety about the future of the nation-state and national citizenship at the moment of decolonization.
Abstract: Postcolonialism, as a discipline and approach, offers an analytical lens through which to investigate problems in formerly colonized states of Africa and South Asia, along with a poststructuralist perspective on culture and discourse on politics of representation. Pakistan is one such former colony where postcolonial narratives and the persistence of colonial legacies such as the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR), on its periphery of Pashtun-dominated tribal areas of FATA, has contributed to growing instability in the region.
