Spotlighted Event
Guest Speaker: Ishita Banerjee - "Caste, Gender and Identities: Democracy and Secularism in South Asia"
Begins |
21 Apr 2008 - 6:00pm |
| Ends |
21 Apr 2008 - 8:00pm |
| Location |
Machinist Conference Room, Mezzanine Level, 65 5th Ave. (go up stairs next to cafeteria) |
GPIA Presents
Ishita Banerjee
El Colegio de México
Monday, April 21st
6- 8 p.m.
Machinist Conference Room, List Academic Center
Mezzanine Level, 65 5th Ave.
(go up the stairs next to the cafeteria)
This talk will examine certain salient and distinctive features of Indian democracy, namely, the co-existence of universal individual rights for citizens and cultural rights for communities, and the provision of caste and class based reservation, and analyze their impact in the formation of identities. It would explore key understandings and deployments of caste identities in contemporary India in order to question the facile acceptance of caste as a religious institution and it would track the diverse and adverse implications of cultural rights for women to raise questions about notions of equality and citizenship. In brief, the presentation will take the Indian case as an instance of the fused and polyvalent articulations of the religious and the political and the individual and the collective to probe vital assumptions that underlie dominant understandings of democracy and secularism.
Ishita Banerjee is Professor at the Center for Asian and African
Studies, El Colegio de México. She has worked on questions of religion,
power and gender in everyday arenas. She has authored Religion, Law and
Power: Tales of Time in Eastern India (Anthem Press,London, 2007);
Divine Affairs. Religion, Pilgrimage and the State in Colonial and
Postcolonial India (Shimla, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2001).
Her latest edited book is titled Caste in History (Oxford University
Press, Delhi, 2007).