Papers – Page 70 – ECSAS 2025

The Construction of Hate: The Political Landscape of Narrative and Infrastructure

Hate is more than just an emotion; it is constructed through discourses and physical infrastructures that shape social realities. This paper explores how hateful narratives are used as a political tool to create social fragmentation in society, framing one group as an outsider and thereby legitimising violence and marginalisation. Concurrently, material infrastructure such as walls, […]

Media Narratives and Public Discourses: ‘Hate’and Exclusion of Ahmadiyyas in South India

This paper explores the everyday manifestations of ‘hate’ against the Ahmadiyya community in South India, focusing on how symbolic violence sustains and affirms majoritarian politics within Muslim society. While much scholarly attention is often given to the Sunni-Shia divide, the exclusion of the Ahmadiyyas reveals the broader stratification within Muslim communities. As one of the […]

The Iconoclasm of the Iconoclast – On Ambedkar, Visuality & Violence

As an art historian in training, I bring new perspectives to the study of caste and culture through my focus on iconoclasm and iconophobia. The ongoing research combines multimodal methods that span ethnographic description, qualitative surveys, and visual data charts and implicates multiple sites including the public commons, court room, police stations, and social media […]

Writings on Hate Speech and Violence: Fiction, Memoir, Non-fiction

Writing used to be considered a form of witnessing; to record for posterity, to mark the present so that it would “never again” be allowed to occur. To keep a diary, write a realist work of fiction, a searing short story or a memoir interspersed with journalistic facts might have once been considered acts of […]

Public Intimacies: Hindu Nationalist Rhetoric and The Circulatory Politics of Hate

The paper will examine how Hindu nationalist leaders shape intimate social spaces, fostering a culture where anti-Muslim rhetoric is normalised and expected. Using feminist hermeneutics and discourse analysis, speeches from the Ram Mandir inauguration and 2024 Lok Sabha election campaigns— archived in print, audiovisual, and digital media— will be analysed to study the production of […]

The Language of Violence: Politics of Hate and Identity in the ‘Hindu’ Nation

Hate against religious minorities is not merely an expression of hostility but also acentral element within the social, political, and religious makeup of India. Drawing on Freud’sidea of repression and Lacan’s concept of jouissance, this research focuses on the role of hatein the formation of the Hindu nationalist identity, and the simultaneous othering of minorities.By […]

Silence, self-censorship and compromise as ordinary violence: An ethnographic portrait of a Muslim businessmen in the Hindu pilgrim economy

In this paper I draw on longitudinal research in Banaras conducted intermittently between 2014 and 2024 to discuss the progressive normalisation of everyday, banal forms of violence in the lives of ordinary Muslims, precisely during a time of resurgence and entrenchment of majoritarian politics. To do that, I take a micro-scale ethnographic approach and trace […]

Unlikely Liaisons: Indians & Transnational Networks Inside Internment Camps in Germany (1939-1945)

The Second World War witnessed massive deployment of soldiers across the globe, often resulting in their detainment in “enemy” lands. The internment camp thus emerged as an important institution of forced displacement during this period, housing diverse races and nationalities. This paper aims to examine the transnational solidarities formed between the prisoners in camps during […]

Subaltern Worldmaking after War: India, Indonesia and the Indian Ocean Anticolonial Moment, 1945-1946

This paper considers how mass wartime transit engendered new anticolonial affinities and shared imaginations of decolonised futures. In exploring the presence of Indian and Indonesian subalterns across an embattled Indian Ocean, this paper looks at an understudied moment of subaltern solidarity between peripatetic colonial subjects in the transition from the end of the Second World […]

Student Activism and the Moral Politics of Declassing/Un-bodying in Contemporary India

Drawing on the theory of subject formation developed by Jacques Rancière, this paper advances the concept of declassing, understood as a moral and embodied language of renunciation and selflessness associated with the acquisition of left activist capital in contemporary Indian student politics […]