Making of a ‘new India’ 1997- 2012’

The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

cordially invites you to the Weekly Seminar

at 3.00 pm on Tuesday, 12 March, 2013

in the Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building

on

‘Four emblematic figures and the making of a

‘new India’ 1997- 2012’

by

Prof. A. R. Vasavi,

Senior Fellow, NMML.

Abstract:

In the promotion and making of the neo-liberal economy and its attendant cultures, the agriculturist, the IT professional, the school teacher, and the child represent sharply varied worlds. Even as agriculture and rural India, once considered the repository of Indian culture and civilization, face sharp erosion, the IT industry and its professionals have gained centre-stage in the narratives of the ‘new, globalizing India’. Subject to and representing the new bearers and transmitters of nationalism, development and modernity, teachers occupy ambiguous positions where their agency is both recognized and eroded.  And, even as elementary education is promoted to envelop and ‘nationalize’ children, reports indicate the increasing vulnerability of a large proportion of children.

These sutured realities of the ‘new India’ have implications for the ways and strategies through which the lives, rights, citizenship, identities, and institutions of a range of people are being reformulated. The results are new relational positionalities, boundaries, affiliations and orientations which are being forged between different groups of people and between them and the nation state.  The narratives related to these emblematic figures contain and represent a social and cultural biography of globalizing India in the new millennium and highlight how the nation is being both re- imagined and the once imagined post-colonial nation is being reconstituted.

Speaker:

Prof. A.R.Vasavi, was until recently a Professor of Social Anthropology at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India. She is currently a Senior Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. Her books on rural India are: Harbingers of Rain: Land and Life in South India, and the more recent Shadow Space: Suicides and the Predicament of Rural India. Her academic interests are in the fields of agrarian studies, sociology of India and educational studies.

All are welcome.

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