thanks to Frank Conlon of H-ASIA for passing this LONG message along

Conference: "The State of Hurt: Sentiment, Politics, Censorship",
Delhi University (South Campus), October 12-13, 2012

*****************************************************************
Ed note: This conference announcement reflects a gathering later this
week in Delhi on a subject of enormous importance for the life of
India's civil society--the politics of the 'hurting of feelings' of
essentialist groups of people, eg, religion, caste, community. The
notice as posted on H-Announcements contains a general description,
but is lacking any information as to the time or venue of the
conference. A Google search led me to a Facebook page which provides
much more complete information which I am adding to this post at the
end. Because presumably only readers in the Delhi area could
anticipate being able to attend this event, I include the schedule of
presentations on the assumption that the end-product should be
familiar to any scholar interested in contemporary India--or, come to
that, just about anywhere else in the world where identity politics
is practiced. [SEE APPENDIX AT END OF ANNOUNCEMENT] FFC
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: H-Net Announcements:

The State of Hurt: Sentiment, Politics, Censorship Location: India
Conference Date: 2012-10-12 (in 3 days)
Date Submitted: 2012-10-08
Announcement ID: 197690

Situated at a historic conjuncture of mass-mediated outrage, this
conference will attempt to interrogate the political register of hurt
vis--vis its conditions of production and retaliation. Recent events
such as the furore over a public reading from Salman Rushdies banned
novel The Satanic Verses, the fractious debates in the Indian
Parliament over an Ambedkar cartoon in NCERT school curriculum and
the arbitrary removal of a Ramanujan essay on The Ramayana from
university textbooks are only symptomatic of larger tendencies in
political expression. The latter has invented a new vocabulary of
vulnerable political subjectivities, constantly living in fear of
difference and critique. It has then periodically called upon the
sovereign state to revive its pledge for democratic pluralism through
punitive-prohibitive checks on the freedom of expression or protest.

The currency of hurt as a claim to and pretext for political
correctionism and often taking recourse to the logic of the
anti-popular as anti-state has helped institute a machinery of
censorship, ever governed by the economies and excesses of a
marketplace of outrage. It is this ready vocabulary of a potential
victimhood and how it can become an excuse for repressive regimes of
state-vigilantism that we seek to map through dialogues and
discussions at the conference. Moving past the clinical notion of
hurt as bodily harm, one needs to discern the definitional contours
of this new economy of fear and pain. What constitutes the
tangibility of hurt, in order to be recognized by the political
apparatus as a sentiment worthy of redressal? Or, in other words,
when and with how much of it does hurt become political? Does it need
to be reciprocally collectivized in order to gain political credence
and visibility? Would some individual litigants petition in the Delhi
High Court against an apparently defamatory depiction of Bharat Mata
in a film song count as a case of hurt? Or, must the litigant as
indeed he did necessarily reference all Indian citizens in his PIL as
a precondition for the seriousness (because, publicness) of his being
hurt? Is the political emergency of hurt, therefore, in its inherence
within a logic of the community -- the people-as-state? And does it
hence empower the state to act on behalf of its citizens, by
summarily outlawing difference as criminal a social therapy for a
public injury? Significantly, Section 153 of the IPC makes a criminal
offence of anything that promotes disharmony or feelings of enmity,
hatred or ill-will between different religious, racial, language or
regional groups or castes and communities. Does hurt then authorize
the law-court [read: sovereign power] to counter-hurt or
counter-offend as the only legitimate cure for it? Or, is it that the
authoritarian state manufactures and strategically facilitates
different articulations of hurt to potentially eliminate every threat
to its own constitutional sovereignty, every trace of dissent?
Inasmuch as the epistemological validity of hurt is in its being only
a claim based on perception(s) of potential threat, it is yet
unreal(ized). And despite its logic of a pure possibility of harm or
pain, this political definition of hurt as claim-against-threat has
mobilized an entire history of real oppression through legislative
action. While the states condemnation of motivated fundamentalist
attempts to hurt (through divisive rhetoric and hate speech) must of
course be lauded, when does power end up using popular sentiment as a
pretext for self-defence? While on the one hand dominant majoritarian
forces have repeatedly injured the sentiments of religious-ethnic
communities, they have on the other ironically fetishized hurt as the
only guarantor of a status quo. M.F. Hussain, arguably Indias most
eminent painter, was charged with hurting the sentiments of the
people by the court in 2006, for depicting female Hindu deities in
the nude, and faced death threats from various nationalist groups in
India. Arundhati Roy, writer and political activist, was charged with
sedition in 2010 for a purported anti-India speech. The four writers,
who read from The Satanic Verses at the Jaipur Literature Festival in
2012, were threatened with physical harm, to say nothing of the
author of the text, Salman Rushdie, who has been labouring under the
excesses begotten by the fatwa against him. A peoples Chief Minister
in an Indian state made way for the first anniversary of her term in
office by ordering the arrest of a university professor for
circulating via e-mail a cartoon graphic of her. The instances have
been many, but it would seem from these instances, that the many
people of India remain in a ready state of hurtfulness, amenable to
the slightest provocation, the smallest incitement, and least
aggravation. It is this state of ready hurt that led senior
journalist and editor, Mukund Padmanabhan, to term ours a republic of
hurt sentiments. This conference aims to bring together all these
different events to bear upon the politics of hurt, and investigate
the many ways in which such hurt is expressed, engendered and elaborated.


Dr. Rina Ramdev
Associate Professor
Department of English
Sri Venkateswara College
University of Delhi
Email: rinaramdev@yahoo.com
==========================================================
APPENDIX from the conference Facebook page:

..
Venue: Conference Hall 117, South Campus, Delhi University.

UGC National Conference organized by English Literary Association,
Sri Venkateswara College in collaboration with Department of English, DU.

Speakers:
Romila Thapar, Mushirul Hasan, Janaki Nair, PK Datta, Uma
Chakravarti, Lakshmi Subramanian, Shohini Ghosh,Tapan Basu, Radhika
Chopra, Prasanta Chakravarty, Anup Dhar, Mukul Manglik, Dilip Simeon,
Githa Hariharan, Krishna Menon, Lawrence Liang, Sudhanva Deshpande,
Vinita Chandra, Karen Gabriel, Siddharth Narrain, Soumyabrata
Choudhury, Paromita Vohra, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Sunalini Kumar, Akhil
Katyal and Gautam Bhan


Programme Schedule:

Day 1: October 12, 2012 (Friday)

9:00 am: Inauguration

9:30 am-11:00 am

Panel 1 The Hermeneutics of Hurt
Chair: Mushirul Hasan

Dilip Simeon, Between Speech and Silence

Shohini Ghosh, The Alchemy of Hate and Hurt: Hate Speech and the
Politics of Censorship

Anup Dhar, What if the Hurt is Real?

11:00 am-11:15 am: Tea

11:15 am-12:45 pm

Panel 2 The Hurting State, Stating Hurt
Chair: Sambudha Sen

Mushirul Hasan, The Muslim Hurt

Radhika Chopra, Commemorating Hurt

Akhil Katyal, The Re-ascription of Hurt: When Abu Gharaib came to Kashmir

12:45 pm-1:30 pm: Lunch


1:30 pm-3:00 pm

Panel 3 Knowledge and its Discontents
Chair: Shohini Ghosh

Prasanta Chakravarty, Silences and Conditionals

Krishna Menon, Revisiting Harm, Humour and Humiliation

Mukul Manglik, AK Ramanujans Tryst with the Politics of Hurt Sentiments

3:00 pm-3:15 pm: Tea

3:15 pm-4:45 pm

Panel 4 Gating Communities, Sensing the Political
Chair: Lawrence Liang

Sunalini Kumar, Sense and Sentimentality: A Political Fable

Tapan Basu, Writing Humiliation, Righting Humiliation: Marking the
Dalit Moment in the History of Indias Untouchables and Beyond

Soumyabrata Choudhury, Which is the Body that Hurts? Ambedkars
Analytical Question vis--vis the Experience of Violence

5:00 pm onwards

Stand-Up Comedy by Gautam Bhan


Day 2: October 13, 2012 (Saturday)

9:30 am-11:00 am

Panel 5 Hurt Selves: In Protest and Performance
Chair: Tapan Basu

Lakshmi Subramanian, A Plea for Tamil Music: Politics of Hurt

Sudhanva Deshpande, The Discreet Charm of Identity Politics

Vinita Chandra, Giti Chandra and Rina Ramdev, Of JAB and Hurt:
Exploring Spaces of Resistance within the University

11:00 am-11:15 am: Tea


11:30 am-12:45 pm

Panel 6 Dirty Picture: Grimy Transgressions within Film and New Media
Chair: PK Datta

Lawrence Liang, Publicity, Privacy and the Erotics of Law and Scandal

Paromita Vohra, Unsealed with a Kiss: Intimacy, Cinema and Outrage'

Karen Gabriel, Pleasure, Excess and Containment in the Field of Vision

12:45 pm-1:30 pm: Lunch


1:30 pm3:00 pm

Panel 7 The New Republics of Hurt
Chair: Lakshmi Subramanian

PK Datta, Communities of Hurt and the Politics of Sentiment

Uma Chakravarti, A Different Kind of Hurt: Understanding the Politics
of Sentiment

Siddharth Narrain, Hate, Hurt and the Law: Examining the Law on Hate
Speech in India

3:00 pm-3:15 pm: Tea

3:15 pm-5:15 pm

Panel Discussion:
Romila Thapar, Janaki Nair, Githa Hariharan, Vishwajyoti Ghosh

5:15 pm-5:30 pm: Valedictory

5:30 pm onwards: Student Performances
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
About Speakers/ Papers:

DILIP SIMEON

'Between Speech and Silence'

If Aristotle's definition of humans as political animals (zoon
politikon) is true, equally true is the proposition that politics is
based on speech. Politics involves speech about common concerns -
between equals, even if the equality lasts only for the duration of
the communication. Where there is no speech, there is no politics.
The advent of violence implies the end of speech. It also implies the
weakness of the violent actors. The exercise of control based upon
violence and intimidation signifies a subtraction of power, because
as Gandhi said, what is granted under fear can be retained only as
long as the fear lasts. Tyrants are the most unstable rulers, because
they possess implements of enforcement, but lack power. When
sentiment is used as a means to dominate the speech of others by way
of force, then this reference to sentiment symbolizes tyranny, not
democracy. It is also the enforcement of public deceit, because what
is being stated is not that I am offended, and the reasons thereof,
but that I propose to be violent and destructive unless my demands
are accepted. So called hurt sentiment has now become the cutting
edge of a campaign to replace democracy with mob rule.

Dilip Simeon is a well-known labour historian and author. He taught
history at Ramjas College from 1974 till 1994. From 1998 till 2003 he
worked on a conflict-mitigation project with Oxfam; and is now
chairperson of the Aman Trust, which works to reduce violent
conflict. He has been a visiting scholar in Surat, Sussex, Chicago,
Leiden and Princeton. His thesis, The Politics of Labour Under Late
Colonialism, was published in 1995; and his first novel, Revolution
Highway in September 2010. He was an active participant in the first
phase of the Naxalite movement. From 1984 onward, he participated in
the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan.


SHOHINI GHOSH

'The Alchemy of Hate and Hurt: Hate Speech and Censorship'

Hate speech involves words or images that promote hatred towards
particular groups or individuals or convey hatred and prejudice based
on race, religion, gender and/or some social grouping.
Internationally, hate speech is the generic term for speech attacks
on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation or any other
social grouping. Advocates of suppressing hate speech claim that this
kind of speech promotes discrimination and violence against those it
describes. The protection of hate speech has been a bitter bone of
contention among those who want to protect the Right to Freedom of
Speech and Expression. While acknowledging the centrality of
censorship in this debate, the presentation will attempt to present a
series of reflections on wounding, the many `states of injury and
what I will describe as a `hierarchy of hurt.

Shohini Ghosh is Professor at the AJK Mass Communication Centre at
Jamia Millia Islamia. She is the author of 'Fire: A Queer Film
Classic' (2010) published by Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver/Orient
paperbacks, Delhi. Her documentary Tales of the Night Fairies (2002)
is on the sex workers movement in Calcutta and an intervention in the
feminist debates on the decriminalization of sex work. Ghosh works on
popular cinema, documentary, censorship and issues concerning media
and sexuality.


ANUP DHAR

'What, if the hurt is Real?'

This paper looks at hurt at two related levels. One is at the level
of the experience of hurt: who is hurt? Who can hurt? When and how is
one hurt? Is nearness/relatedness the condition of being hurt? The
other is the level of the response to hurt; and the politics (at
times, mobilization and consolidation) around hurt. While treatment
(that is akin to the response and the politics) may at times by far
overtake the menace of the disease (that is akin to the experience of
hurt), the pain/suffering of disease can nevertheless be ignored. The
ground of experience cannot be erased by the groundlessness (or the
instrumental use of the rhetoric of hurt, or the irrational, at times
politically incorrect nature) of the response. One cannot disavow the
experience pole through a denouncement of the response pole. The
paper shall argue that if the phenomenology of pain/suffering attends
to one pole of the issue of hurt, the concept of the political
attends to the other; and the uncanny, perhaps politically perplexing
response of those at the receiving end need to be understood not in
terms of the accepted/conventional idioms of resistance but from what
Cornel West calls ontological wounding. An argument premised on one
pole (that is the political) cannot cancel the other pole (here
pain/suffering), necessarily. The paper shall understand the
experience of hurt, again, at two related levels; it would ask:
should one approach hurt through the question of the really real, or
could it be approached through the perspective of the Lacanian Real.

Anup Dhar is Associate Professor at the School of Human Studies,
Ambedkar University, Delhi. A trained doctor, he has been a Research
Fellow in Women's Studies at The Asiatic Society, Kolkata and a
Fellow in Cultural Studies at the Centre for the Study of Culture and
Society (CSCS), Bangalore. He has also taught at the School of
Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, Christ University-Bangalore,
University of Calcutta and Symbiosis Institute of Mass Communication.
He is the Research Coordinator of CUSP an applied research programme
on Rethinking Mental Health. He was one of the founder members of
 From the Margins: a journal of critical theory in a postcolonial
setting Kolkata (1998-2003). His publications include 'Dislocation
and Resettlement in Development: From Third World to World of the
Third' (2009, co-authored by A. Chakrabarti) and 'Global Capitalism
and World of the Third' (2011, co-authored with A. Chakrabarti and S.
Cullenberg). He is currently completing a book titled 'The Secret
Politics of Ab-Original Psychoanalysis: Fort-Da between the
Windscreen and the Rear-view Mirror'.


RADHIKA CHOPRA

'Commemorating Hurt'

The storming of the Golden Temple, a Sikh sacred site, and its
premier sacred buildings, by the Indian army on 6 June 1984, is
commemorated as Ghallughara Diwas (Day of Genocide) every year in the
first week of June. Evoking a sense of continuity across space and
time, the meaning of Ghallughara Diwas has nevertheless altered
significantly. This paper traces the performance of the commemorative
ritual at two sites of its enactment. At the Golden Temple in
Amritsar, India, the commemoration is a ritualized critique of state
violence, continually referencing the devastation of the Akal Takht
while celebrating martyrs killed in the army action. Within Temple
celebrations, a sense of a restoration of order and divine authority
prevail. The ritual referencing to the hurt inflicted on community
and temporal authority, embodied by the Akal Takht, coupled with the
merging of individual leaders of Khalistan within the generalized
category of martyr, eclipse the charisma of individuals, to reassert
the order of the collective. But subtle shifts in meanings surface
through the performances shift and alter the site of hurt away from
the mutilated Takht to the militant-martyr.

Disappeared Persons are the focus of ritual observances among the
Sikh Diaspora in London. The assertion of trauma and loss of homeland
as central to discursive formations of hurt link claims for political
asylum and rights of residence with Human Rights discourses.
Simultaneously, visually dramatic processions in central London and
huge digital displays, spectacularly present the sangat (the sacred
collective) to itself. Ritual enactments address the estrangement,
distance and loss that cohere around the idea of hurt within the
Diaspora through recreated event. The literal and metaphoric
resurrection of the event becomes a way of inserting the migrant self
within the political histories of Homeland and keeping alive the
sense of collective hurt.

Radhika Chopra is the author of Militant and Migrant: The Politics
and Social History of Punjab (Routledge, 2011) and co-editor of South
Asian Masculinities: Contexts of Change, Sites of Continuity (2004),
among other publications. Her areas of research and interest are the
sociologies of Punjab, gender and masculinities, visual anthropology
and she is currently working on the politics of the museum of the
Darbar Sahib. She has curated two film-cum-discussion series Making
Migrants: Dialogues through Film (2009), and School in Cinema (2004),
and an exhibition Men and Masculinities. She is on the Editorial
Board of Culture Society and Masculinities, Mens Studies Press and
Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, Taylor and Francis. Most
recently she convened a panel Shards of Memory: Memorials,
Commemorations, Remembrance at the 40th IIS World Congress, The
International Institute of Sociology, and the Annual Conference, ASA2012.


AKHIL KATYAL

'The Reascription of Hurt: When Abu Gharaib came to Kashmir'

When the hurting body is the State, the expression of that hurt is a
political crisis. The State turns this crisis into an opportunity for
censorship by a reascription of the cause of this hurt. After the
allegations of crying wolf run aground, the branches of the State try
and bury the evidence of the hurt by the logic of keeping 'law and
order'. Justice, in this etiological turn, is the cause of hurt not
its salve. In Sept, 2012, the J&K Home Ministry rejected the testing
of DNA from the unidentified graves, as desired by the SHRC as it
would 'hurt the local sentiments' of the people, 'attract undesired
media attention, cause prolonged trauma' and would 'also act as a
trigger point...for causing serious law and order disturbances'. I
will look into the case of the frantic sharing of the 8 Sept, 2010
video 'India's Abu Gharib (sic)' where Indian security forces paraded
young Kashmiri men naked in a field. Once the video began to dig its
heels into the internet, the State police formally ascribed the cause
of hurt to the very sharing of the video, not to the actions within
it. The police threatened to sue Facebook and Youtube vis-a-vis the
video for 'attribut[ing] it to security forces with the intention of
maligning them and spreading disaffection among the people'. In
Kashmir, the cause of hurt is the sharing of hurt. The State attempts
to mute the crisis etiologically by appropriating the language of
trauma. However, the censored material spills over the ban, and
finally, causes to split the State and pit its branches against one another.

Akhil Katyal finished his PhD at SOAS and currently teaches
literature at Delhi University. He is currently writing the biography
of the poet Agha Shahid Ali. He blogs at akhilkatyalpoetry.blogspot.com.


PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY

'Silences and Conditionals'

One of the significant ways in which literary interpretation and
institutional building can come together is by calibrating and
managing an experiential notion of political hurt through an ethics
of silence: in the way, one reads texts, expects a community of
professional readers to engage with texts, books, other cultural
artefacts and to finally take it over methodologically for running
and strategizing the day to day governance of our educational and
research institutions. This mode could at once be deeply ethical,
quiescent and anarchic and yet thoroughly stand as modern and
professional in its ruthlessness and reach. The paper will try to
unfold, by means of textually reading this ethical approach as
practised by a few influential literary scholars from South Asia, a
pattern by which the excesses of hurt and rage are rationalized and
channelized in order to churn responsible citizens and nation builders.

Prasanta Chakravarty works at the cusp of arts and political
philosophy. His principal research interest lies in heterodox and
non-conformist political and religious writings /movements
of early modern Europe where he explores the connections between the
hermeneutical-interpretive traditions of literature, especially those
encountered in heterodox pamphlets and treatises and the public
political nature of those writings. Like Parchment in the Fire:
Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War (Routledge, New
York and London, 2006) investigates these interests. He is also
deeply invested in contemporary debates on humanities
studies--globally and in South Asia. He is Associate Professor of
English at The University of Delhi.


KRISHNA MENON

'Revisiting Harm, Humour and Humiliation'

Free speech and expression despite being central to the definition of
a liberal society, is a very contentious issue. It is so because this
right is enjoyed within a sovereign modern nation-state that has
immense control and surveillance, censorship initiated by the state
is a constant threat to the right to free speech and expression.
Free speech in any democratic society can however only be a limited
right and not absolute because speech and expression we need to
remind ourselves takes place within a specific context of competing
values and hierarchies.

My paper will re-present the principles on which liberal societies
restrict the right to free speech and expression. John Stuart Mills
harm principle suggests that speech that could cause harm to others
would need to be regulated and indeed restricted. Liberals find it
very difficult to defend free speech once it can be demonstrated that
it invades the rights of others or causes harm.
The other principle invoked to restrict free speech and expression in
a liberal society is the offense principle postulated by Joel
Feinberg. This principle is based on the idea that sometimes speech
could be deeply offensive to some people while not necessarily causing harm.

Most liberals today would adopt the offense principle along with the
Millian harm principle; they would extend the need for some sort of
curtailment of free speech on the grounds that sometimes it is not
consistent with the basic principles of a liberal democracy. Thus for
instance, speech that suggests that some sections of citizens are
inferior to others on grounds of their caste or sexual orientation
would need regulation. The claim is that free speech cannot be
automatically privileged.

The liberal idea that the free market place of ideas would help
discover and understand the truth is however not borne out in the
contexts of highly unequal and hierarchical societies such as ours.
Such a free market place of ideas does not exist, mitigated as it is
by oppression based on caste, gender, class etc. However, the
centrality of free speech in emancipatory movements needs to be
simultaneously stated. Dworkin, Rawls, Raz, Ely and Sustein are among
the contemporary theorists whose positions on free speech need appreciation.

What happens when humour is seen as humiliating? Would this justify a
ban on such expressions? Here, I would refer to the Ambedkar cartoon
controversy and examine the alleged lack of humour on the part of
Dalit groups. I would place this discussion in the context of the
feminist critique of sexist humour. Dalit groups have argued in a
similar vein that while the cartoon might appear innocuous to upper
caste viewers it is deeply offensive and indeed humiliating to
Dalits. Clearly, caste mediates our perception of cartoons and other
similar representations.

In this context should censorship be the answer? A section of
feminists in India have realized and now argue that censorship by the
state is always a dangerous suggestion, rather political engagement
and the creation of a public culture of debate and dissent might be a
better option.

In that vein, I would like to propose that while the Dalit objections
are valid- and my paper will address the nature of these objections,
but in the final instance it would be better to create spaces where
such cartoons or similar representations can be debated and discussed
rather than ask for a ban. Such a ban would facilitate the states
repeated encroachment into the sphere of citizens right to learn,
understand and critique.


Krishna Menon is Associate Professor at the Department of Political
Science, Lady Shri Ram College. She has extensively worked and
published on political theory, Indian politics, and feminist theory
and politics. Apart from academics, classical music and dance are her
other areas of involvement. She is the author of 'Human Rights,
Gender and the Environment' (2009; co-authored by Manisha Priyam and
Madhulika Banerjee).

SUNALINI KUMAR

'Sense and Sentimentality: A Political Fable'

Liberal political theory has scant discussion of sentiment. On the
other hand, modern parliamentary democracies are rife with the
politics of sentiment; and not merely within postcolonial democracies
such as our own. While such politics often take a violent or
censoring turn - increasingly through what the concept-note refers to
as mass-mediated outrage it may be time to disarticulate the uses of
sentiment in modern mass politics and its collusion with powerful
blocs like the State and communally organized groups on the one hand;
and the status of sentiment in ordinary life on the other hand. The
argument here is not for looking at sentiment through rose-tinted
lenses - as an eternal human attribute -but precisely to uncover its
life as a historically constructed category. The paper will also
critically examine the thought of Spinoza and Deleuze, and to see if
their notion of affect and their suggestive expressionism, naturalism
and anti-humanism provide a route or at least a bridge out of the
impasse that is created in our polity between potentially violent
politics of sentiment on the one hand, and a potentially ineffectual
rationalist and humanist liberalism on the other.

Sunalini Kumar is Assistant Professor, Department of political
science, Lady Shri Ram College. She received a masters in social and
political sciences from Cambridge University and an MPhil from
Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her doctoral research is on the idea of
a National Capital Region. Her publications include Chronicle of A
Death Untold: The Lethal Geographies of Delhi's Periphery in Critical
Studies in Politics (edited) Aditya Nigam, Nivedita Menon and Sanjay
Palshikar, Delhi, Orient Blackswan (forthcoming) and Clean Air, Dirty
Logic? Environmental Activism, Citizenship and the Public Sphere in
Delhi in Urbanising Citizenship: Contested Spaces in Indian Cities
(edited) Renu Desai and Romola Sanyal, Thousand Oaks, Delhi and
London, Sage 2012. Sunalini's interests revolve around comparative
urban politics, political philosophy and feminist theory. She blogs
on contemporary politics at Kafila.


TAPAN BASU

'Writing Humiliation, Righting Humiliation: Marking the 'Dalit'
Moment in the History of India's 'Untouchables,' and Beyond.'

My paper will focus upon the dualistic connotations of the term
'Dalit' --- the term signifying at once the so-called outcastes'
experience of downtrodden-ness as well as their attempts to engage
with this experience. In the words of Eleanor Zelliot, " The term
'Dalit' [is] not only to be interpreted as 'the oppressed' but also
as ' the proud, the defiant.' "

Dalit political subjectivity, which emanates out of the
ex-untouchables' consciousness of their everyday debasement within
caste society, can, however, become immobilised into a posture of
perpetual if protesting victimhood, unless informed by Babasaheb
Ambedkar's far--reaching vision of the :"annihilation of caste". The
paper will reflect upon the difficulties of fulfilling the
Ambedkarite project within the framework of India's caste-based social order.

Tapan Basu taught for twenty-eight years in the Department of
English, Hindu College, Delhi, before he took up his present
appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of English,
Delhi University. He has a keen interest in the study of the politics
of identity-constructions and identity-confrontations, especially
along religious and caste lines, in contemporary India. He has edited
Translating Caste (Delhi:Katha:2002), an anthology of fictional and
non-fictional narratives of caste and caste-consciousness. and is the
author of an unpublished monograph on The Writings of B.R.Ambedkar
and the Construction of a Dalit Cultural Identity, written under the
aegis of a fellowship he received from the Social Science Research
Council, New York.


SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY

'Which is the body that hurts? Ambedkars analytical question vis--vis
the experience of violence'

Which is the body that hurts, when violence is felt or threatened to
be felt? Is it an anachronistic body that is victim of a contingent
web of perversions of an otherwise general state of health and peace?
a body excepted and fallen from a normal constitution? Or is what
hurts a self-anathemizing body, which in every instance of wounding,
falls from its own universal and constitutional status and claim? a
body that excepts itself every time its parts hurt, collide against
or threaten to separate from each other?

Anachronism, anathema these are two key words B.R Ambedkar uses in
his criticism of Gandhi with regard to the latters interpretation of
Untouchability and caste-violence in Hindu society and religion. I
will argue that the question is very much alive in contemporary
investigations of Indian society as to whether that which hurts in a
situation of violence and its perceived threat, is an
exceptional/anachronistic part or the body of society itself in the
exposure to its own self-anathemized, self-separated core.

Soumyabrata Choudhury is a Visiting Fellow at CSDS, Delhi. He taught
at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU for several years. He was
Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study till recently
(2012). His book Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the
Relationship of Sovereignty, Power and Truth will come out by the end
of the year from IIAS, Shimla.


GAUTAM BHAN is a stand-up comedian who has lamentably never been
charged with sedition despite many attempts at betraying the nation.
He teaches at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and is also
a sexuality rights activist.


SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

'The Discreet Charm of Identity Politics'

When we think of censorship, we think, possibly in that order, the
censorship exercised by the State, and the censorship exercised by
the religious right. Both these kinds of censorships are alive and
kicking. Think of cartoonists being arrested in Kolkata or Mumbai, or
the Hindu Right's relentless hounding of India's best-known painter
that did not allow him the dignity of dying in the country he so
loved. The first uses the rhetoric of disrespect (to Nation, State,
or merely the individual who stands for these), while the latter uses
the rhetoric of hurt sentiments. Both these kinds of censorship are
easy to recognize and condemn. But there is a third kind of
censorship which uses the same rhetoric of hurt sentiments, but we
are far more ambivalent about this. This is the censorship of caste
groups that see themselves, legitimately or otherwise, as oppressed.
For those who stand in solidarity with the oppressed, it becomes hard
to condemn this sort of censorship, provided we recognize it as such
in the first place. I will explore these ideas with reference to two
plays: Habib Tanvir's Charandas Chor and Govind Deshpande's
Satyashodhak. The attacks on these plays stem from the logic of
identity politics. The question I want to ask is: what is the future
of political art in times of identity politics? And, what is the
future of that -- perhaps utopian -- horizon of the emancipation of
all humankind?

Sudhanva Deshpande is an actor and director with Jana Natya Manch,
Delhi. He works as editor at LeftWord Books. He moonlights as
barrista at May Day Bookstore and Caf and uses the bicycle as his
default mode of transport.


LAWRENCE LIANG

'Publicity, Privacy and the Erotics of Law and Scandal'

The Sting Operations revelation of public corruption and SMS sex
scandals have been two important signposts of contemporary media
life. They have also been at the heart of legal debates over privacy,
media ethics and the legal disorder. The scandal has always been of
one of the sites for the production of a public discourse on law and
the relationship between the public, private and the secret. The
accelerated world of media circulation reworks our understanding of
the scandal and the divide between ideas of public and private. This
paper examines how the discourses of corruption and sexuality in
media constantly reference each other as they meet in the
inappropriate overlap of public and private desires.

Lawrence Liang is a founder member of the Alternative Law Forum, a
collective of inter disciplinary lawyers in Bangalore. He works on
the intersection of law and culture especially as they converge in
intellectual property and media laws. He is also one of the
initiators of Pad.ma (Public Access Digital media Archive) and has
taught in a number of universities across the country.


PAROMITA VOHRA

'Unsealed with a Kiss: Intimacy, Cinema and Outrage'

The presentation will trace the frequently changing presence of the
kiss in Hindi cinema from the 1930s in the context of changing
intimate relations, discussions around personal law and censorship.
Via this story I will also look at the interplay between outrage, the
amplification of scandal via increasingly visual media contexts and
the changing meanings of the represented kiss.

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer whose work has focused on
gender, politics, urban life and popular culture. Her films as
director include Partners in Crime, Morality TV aur Loving Jehad: Ek
Manohar Kahani, Q2P, Where Sandra?, Work In Progress, Cosmopolis: Two
Tales of a City, Unlimited Girls , A Womans Place, A Short Film About
Time and Annapurna: Goddess of Food. She is the writer of the
international feature Khamosh Pani, and the documentaries A Few
Things I Know About Her, If You Pause, The Stuntment of Bollywod and
Skin Deep. Her writings both fiction and non-fiction have been
published in various anthologies including Electric Feather: The
Tranquebar Book of Erotica, Recess: The Penguin Book of Schooldays,
Bombay Meri Jaan and First Proof, Signs, Bioscope and The South Asian
Journal of Popular Culture. She has worked extensively with young
people doing workshops on creativity and politics. She teaches
writing for film as visiting faculty in different universities around
the world and has been a mentor at international scriptwriting
workshops including the British Council-SaReGaMa screenplay workshop
besides being a member of the script committee, Childrens Film
Society of India. She also writes a popular weekly column in the
Sunday Mid-day.


KAREN GABRIEL

'Pleasure. Excess. Containment'

The discourse of hurt has appeared as a renewed one in the realm of
the political, with a consistency and pervasiveness that have given
rise to such disparaging epithets as 'the republic of hurt
sentiments'. Not without reason, the suspicion here is that the hurt
sentiment is often a manufactured one, seeking to incite a move to
community dominance rather paradoxically by alleging the
weakness/vulnerability of the community in the face of a particular
form of 'hurt'. However, this particular dynamic, in this particular
form of alleging hurt in the public domain and seeking redressal,
repair or revenge for the same from the state remains a feature of
the womens movements and of identity politics.
In this paper, I will reexamine an iconic and enduringly resonant
theoretical and political moment in the articulation of this dynamic
of hurt, in which two fundamentally compatible notions of
emancipation of the (female) body and the female subject were
juxtaposed polemically, and therefore oppositionally, with peculiar
consequences for the understandings of pleasure, pain, violence and
excess. The paper will instantiate and elaborate this using two or
three significant moments in the history of cinematic representation.

Karen Gabriel is Associate Professor at the department of English,
St. Stephens College, University of Delhi, and Director, Center for
Gender, Culture and Social Processes at St Stephens College. She has
written extensively on issues of gender, sexuality, cinema and the
nation-state. Her book Melodrama and the Nation: Sexual Economies of
Bombay cinema 1970-2000 was published by Women Unlimited in 2010. She
is currently working on a book on sexuality, transnationalisation and
convergence. She has received various international fellowships and
most recently, in 2012, the prestigious European Union's
International Incoming Marie Curie Fellowship.

PRADIP KUMAR DATTA

'The Politics of Sentiment and Communities of Hurt'

The presentation will locate the emergence of the politics of
sentiment in the importance given to collective selfhood in
nineteenth century India. Self-fashioning was regarded a precious
resource for both freeing oneself from the representations of
dominant social and political groups such as colonial authority and
upper caste social hegemony as well as producing a new self that
would, grounded on a sense of equality and\or of competition, be
collectively able to compete successfully in the pursuit of power and
respect. The sense of sentiment was crucial to the production of this
new subject since it expressed the ways in which the community
experienced itself as a social subject. Further, sentiment produced a
claim that could rival the transcendental status of Colonial Law and,
being located in the interstices of personal and criminal law,
proclaim the sanctity of extra-local communities. It is within this
emergence of the politics of selfhood that I will locate the
communities of hurt. Hurt communities complicate the functioning of
Law by privileging their sentiment and honour over the other. The
result is the formation of communities that define themselves by
antagonism with their other which in turn, produces new authority
structures within the community itself. The other for these
communities are rivals rather than oppressors since these are posited
on competition for dominant status in the polity and civic life of
the nation. Schematically put then, the politics of selfhood produces
two kinds of grounding principles of competition: that of equality
which corresponds to acquiring the resources to compete with dominant
others on the one hand and of a rivalry directed towards the
domination of the other. Of course this is an analytical schema and
is complicated in the actual workings out of these politics. This is
important to bear in mind when we look at such communities under globalisation.

The contemporary period of globalisation has weakened the
nation-state but not replaced it. This opens up various gaps in
political authority and law that are sought to be filled in with new
kinds of communities operating within nations which also aspire
towards globalising themselves. These communities typically draw on
apparently negative representations of itself by others to produce
controls over its own self-representations. Further, their
aspirations to either majoritiarian domination or to seclusion lead,
in different ways, to remaking the bases of their existing nation
states. The claims on sentiment produce the grounds of authority on
top of which these communities can claim a new kind of legitimacy
that will reinforce their community boundaries and provide an
alternative law. The appeal to hurt and to sentiment represents the
first fracture with such laws and holds out the promise of
authoritarian communities that are so precisely because they need to
engage in violence against other communities.

Pradip Kumar Datta teaches at the Department of Political Science,
Delhi University. Among other institutions, he has taught for several
years at the Department of English, Sri Venkateswara College. His
work focuses on debates in contemporary Indian politics, the history
of communalism and modern Bengali literature. He is the author of
'Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal'
(1999), 'Nandigram and Other Struggles: Emergence of New Political
Movements' (2007) and 'Heterogeneities: Identity Formations in Modern
India' (2010). Professor Datta has also edited a critical companion
to Tagore's The Home and the World (Permanent Black; 2003)

SIDDHARTH NARRAIN

'Hate, Hurt and the Law: Examining the law on Hate Speech in India'

Hate Speech is often described as the faultline that divides
advocates of free speech in India. In India hate speech legislation
has taken the form of criminal law codified in the Indian Penal Code
and Criminal Procedure Code. This paper attempts to look at the
history and development of the category of hate speech in India
beginning at the time of the colonial encounter, and examining how
the memory of Partition, and the anxieties of the postcolonial state
shape the contours of the law on hate speech.

Siddharth Narrain is a legal researcher and lawyer with the
Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. His areas of interest include,
media laws and censorship, and the gender and sexuality politics of
the Indian judiciary. He has worked as a journalist for Frontline
Magazine and The Hindu newspaper in New Delhi. Email: sid@altlawforum.org


ROMILA THAPAR is Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Historical
Studies, JNU. An internationally famed historian, her work revolves
around the study of ancient India. Having earned her doctorate from
SOAS - London, she taught at the Department of History in DU before
moving to Jawaharlal Nehru University as the Chair in Ancient Indian
History. Professor Thapar is Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall,
Oxford and has been Visiting Professor at Cornell University and the
University of Pennsylvania as well as the Collge de France in Paris.

In 1983 she was elected General President of the Indian History
Congress and in 1999 a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
In 2004, the U.S. Library of Congress appointed her as the first
holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South. She
holds honorary doctorates from University of Chicago, Institut
National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, University
of Oxford, University of Edinburgh, University of Calcutta and
University of Hyderabad. Twice awarded the Padma Bhushan, Professor
Thapar declined it by saying that she doesn't accept state-disbursed
titles. Her publications include 'Ashoka and the Decline of the
Mauryas' (1961), 'A History of India' (1966), 'The Past and
Prejudice' (1971), 'Ancient Indian Social History: Some
Interpretations' (1978), 'From Lineage to State: Social Formations of
the Mid-First Millennium B.C. in the Ganges Valley' (1985), 'History
and Beyond' (2000), 'Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories' (2002),
'Cultural Pasts: Essays in Earlier Indian History' (2003),
'Somanatha: The Many Voices of History' (2005), 'The Aryan: Recasting
Constructs' (2008).


JANAKI NAIR is Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her research and teaching
interests include urban, visual, legal and labour history, and
feminist studies. Her books include Women and Law in Colonial India
(1996), The Promise of the Metropolis (2005) and Mysore Modern:
Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule (2011).


GITHA HARIHARAN is a writer and scholar whose published work includes
novels, short stories, essays, newspaper articles and columns. In
1995, Hariharan challenged the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act as
discriminatory against women. The case, Githa Hariharan and Another
vs. Reserve Bank of India and Another, led to a Supreme Court
judgment in 1999 on guardianship. Her first novel, The Thousand Faces
of Night (1992) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1993. Her
other novels include The Ghosts of Vasu Master (1994), When Dreams
Travel (1999), In Times of Siege (2003), and Fugitive Histories
(2009). A collection of highly acclaimed short stories, The Art of
Dying, was published in 1993, and a book of stories for children, The
Winning Team, in 2004. Githa Hariharan has also edited a volume of
stories in English translation from four major South Indian
languages, A Southern Harvest (1993); and co-edited a collection of
stories for children, Sorry, Best Friend! (1997). Hariharan's fiction
has been translated into a number of languages including French,
Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Greek, Urdu and Vietnamese; her
essays and fiction have also been included in anthologies such as
Salman Rushdie's Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997.
Hariharan wrote, for several years, a regular column for the major
Indian newspaper The Telegraph. She has been Visiting Professor or
Writer-in-Residence in several universities, including Dartmouth
College and George Washington University in the United States, the
University of Canterbury at Kent in the UK, and Jamia Millia Islamia
in India, where she is, at present, Scholar-in-Residence.


VISHWAJYOTI GHOSH is the author of the graphic novel Delhi Calm (www.
delhicalm.wordpress.com), a political graphic novel set in the 70's
and a visual book of postcards Times New Roman & Countrymen. Ghosh is
also the creator of the cartoon column Full Toss in Hindustan Times
Edit Page, every Sunday, besides his earlier columns like Backlog in
Little Magazine and Acid Test in Down to Earth. His comics are
regularly published in various journals and anthologies, both in
India and abroad. Associated with Inverted Commas a communications
initiative, he is currently working on a mapping project in the
wokers clusters of Gurgaon. As a founder member of the Pao
Collective, he also remains an active and dynamic participant in
graphic/comics artists collective projects and works often with
graphic artists from different parts of South Asia.
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Concept Note:

Situated at a historic conjuncture of mass-mediated outrage, this
conference will attempt to interrogate the political register of hurt
vis--vis its conditions of production and retaliation. Recent events
such as the furore over a public reading from Salman Rushdies banned
novel The Satanic Verses, the fractious debates in the Indian
Parliament over an Ambedkar cartoon in NCERT school curriculum and
the arbitrary removal of a Ramanujan essay on The Ramayana from
university textbooks are only symptomatic of larger tendencies in
political expression. The latter has invented a new vocabulary of
vulnerable political subjectivities, constantly living in fear of
difference and critique. It has then periodically called upon the
sovereign state to revive its pledge for democratic pluralism through
punitive-prohibitive checks on the freedom of expression or protest.

The currency of hurt as a claim to and pretext for political
correctionism and often taking recourse to the logic of the
anti-popular as anti-state has helped institute a machinery of
censorship, ever governed by the economies and excesses of a
marketplace of outrage. It is this ready vocabulary of a potential
victimhood and how it can become an excuse for repressive regimes of
state-vigilantism that we seek to map through dialogues and
discussions at the conference.

Moving past the clinical notion of hurt as bodily harm, one needs to
discern the definitional contours of this new economy of fear and
pain. What constitutes the tangibility of hurt, in order to be
recognized by the political apparatus as a sentiment worthy of
redressal? Or, in other words, when and with how much of it does hurt
become political? Does it need to be reciprocally collectivized in
order to gain political credence and visibility? Would some
individual litigants petition in the Delhi High Court against an
apparently defamatory depiction of Bharat Mata in a film song count
as a case of hurt? Or, must the litigant as indeed he did necessarily
reference all Indian citizens in his PIL as a precondition for the
seriousness (because, publicness) of his being hurt? Is the political
emergency of hurt, therefore, in its inherence within a logic of the
community -- the people-as-state? And does it hence empower the state
to act on behalf of its citizens, by summarily outlawing difference
as criminal a social therapy for a public injury? Significantly,
Section 153 of the IPC makes a criminal offence of anything that
promotes disharmony or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill-will between
different religious, racial, language or regional groups or castes
and communities. Does hurt then authorize the law-court [read:
sovereign power] to counter-hurt or counter-offend as the only
legitimate cure for it? Or, is it that the authoritarian state
manufactures and strategically facilitates different articulations of
hurt to potentially eliminate every threat to its own constitutional
sovereignty, every trace of dissent?

Inasmuch as the epistemological validity of hurt is in its being only
a claim based on perception(s) of potential threat, it is yet
unreal(ized). And despite its logic of a pure possibility of harm or
pain, this political definition of hurt as claim-against-threat has
mobilized an entire history of real oppression through legislative
action. While the states condemnation of motivated fundamentalist
attempts to hurt (through divisive rhetoric and hate speech) must of
course be lauded, when does power end up using popular sentiment as a
pretext for self-defence?

While on the one hand dominant majoritarian forces have repeatedly
injured the sentiments of religious-ethnic communities, they have on
the other ironically fetishized hurt as the only guarantor of a
status quo. M.F. Hussain, arguably Indias most eminent painter, was
charged with hurting the sentiments of the people by the court in
2006, for depicting female Hindu deities in the nude, and faced death
threats from various nationalist groups in India. Arundhati Roy,
writer and political activist, was charged with sedition in 2010 for
a purported anti-India speech. The four writers, who read from The
Satanic Verses at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2012, were
threatened with physical harm, to say nothing of the author of the
text, Salman Rushdie, who has been labouring under the excesses
begotten by the fatwa against him. A peoples Chief Minister in an
Indian state made way for the first anniversary of her term in office
by ordering the arrest of a university professor for circulating via
e-mail a cartoon graphic of her. The instances have been many, but it
would seem from these instances, that the many people of India remain
in a ready state of hurtfulness, amenable to the slightest
provocation, the smallest incitement, and least aggravation. It is
this state of ready hurt that led senior journalist and editor,
Mukund Padmanabhan, to term ours a republic of hurt sentiments.

This conference aims to bring together all these different events to
bear upon the politics of hurt, and investigate the many ways in
which such hurt is expressed, engendered and elaborated.
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