76 – Discourses, Narratives, Stories and Contestations from the Margins

October 3, 2025
3:45 pm
H05
Politico-social and economic life is often seen to be determined by structures and institutions that determine behaviour patterns and consequently outcomes. Scholarly analysis is thus focussed on how the various actors – superordinate or subordinate – are located in the distribution of power and wealth and what processes and mechanisms are deployed to interrogate such locations. However, both domination and its contestation are located in the world of ideas and memories whose narrativization first invents a cognitive autonomy that may be mobilised for purposes of contestation. Similarly, domination is also a product of a master narrative that seeks to supress, subsume, deny or forget alternative stories and articulations. Mechanisms and tools of such ideational domination and constatation are varied: storytelling, symbolic and physical memorialisation, printed material, folklore, sociocultural traditions, literature and drama, and so, extending up to new and ontological epistemological challenges by the dominant. Finally, these processes are deeply implicated in construction of worldviews and framing questions of social justice, identity and give meaning to almost all politico-social phenomenon.

Convenors

Prof. Peter B Andersen
Prof. Sanjukta Das Gupta
Prof. Amit Prakash

Presentations

Negotiating Memory in Exile: Tibetan Performative Arts in Kathmandu
Spinelli Lisa - Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Nova University Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
“Do not say anything, Sajoni Kisku!”: Narratives of Adivasi Women Heroism between History and Poetry
Proietti Marilena - Italian Institute of Oriental Studies - ISO, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Resisting colonial master-narratives of the ‘hereditary criminal’: Self-representation by the Chhara Community in Ahmedabad, Gujarat
MUTSUDDI UTSARJANA - Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani, K.K.Birla Goa Campus, Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani, South Goa, India
BAKILAPADAVU GEETHA - Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani, K.K.Birla Goa Campus, Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani, South Goa, India
“How A Village Remembers”: Lore, Visual Memory and Popular Imagination in Nagaland’s Struggle with the Idea of India
MORAL RAKHEE KALITA - Professor of English, Cotton University, GUWAHATI, India
Phom Manngai H - Department of English, Cotton University
Keeping the poor poor: how Pakistan’s elite capitalize on inequity
Javed Warda - School of Public Health, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
Mumtaz Zubia - School of Public Health, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
Contesting Hegemony from the Margins: Sri Lankan and Maldivian Agency in the Face of Sino-Indian Hegemonic Competition in the Indian Ocean
Frumento Sara - University of Oxford, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Reviving Traditions: Puppetry and story-telling among the Santals of eastern India
Das Gupta Sanjukta - Dipartimento Istituto Italiano di Studi Orientali, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Aligning the Margins: Indigenous Commons and Planetary (in)Justice in Siddhartha Sarma’s Year of the Weeds
Somasree Sarkar - Ghoshpukur College, University of North Bengal, Siliguri, India
Agnibha Maity - University of North Bengal, Siliguri, India