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National Seminar
Locating the Public Sphere in Contemporary India: Theory and Practice
Motilal Nehru College, University of Delhi
New Delhi, India
Concept Note
Jurgen Habermas’s influential work on public sphere has had a major impact over multiple disciplines and has contributed to discussions on issues such as literature, media, democracy, and civil society. Public sphere is the space in which private citizens come together as public to discuss matters of 'public concern' or 'common interest'. The 'public sphere' thus is "a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body" (1989). The nature of public sphere centres on the idea of participation and how public opinion democratically becomes political action and morally relevant.
Though the nature of public sphere centres on the idea of inclusivity, it has been argued that the bourgeois public sphere was in fact constituted by a number of significant exclusions. In contrast to Habermas’ assertions on inclusivity without regard to status, Nancy Fraser claims that the public sphere is 'anything but accessible to everyone’ (1992). The marginalized groups, though excluded from a universal public sphere, formed their own public spheres, and Fraser termed this as a subaltern counter public or counter-public.
Habermas defines the early public sphere as consisting of organs of information and political debate such as literature, newspapers, journals as well as institutions of political discussion such as parliaments, political clubs, literary salons, public assemblies, pubs and coffee houses, meeting halls and other public spaces.
How exclusionary is the public sphere in contemporary India in terms of caste, class and gender, is one of the areas that this conference will focus on. How do those at the bottom of the economy figure in this public sphere? And what are the strategies employed and gains won by those who fight to enter it? The transformations of the public sphere that Habermas describes depend largely
on its continual expansion to include more and more participants. According to Calhoun, Habermas suggests that this inclusivity brought a decline in the quality of discourse, but contends at the same time that Habermas' two-sided constitution of the category of public sphere meant that it was simultaneously about the quality or form of rational-critical discourse and the quantity of or openness to popular participation. How is the public sphere in contemporary India transformed by the increasing participation of the counter publics is a question that this conference will attempt to address.
In the digital age, the discussion about the public sphere has become increasingly relevant and, at the same time, increasingly problematic. Computer–mediated communication has taken the place of coffeehouse discourse, and issues such as media ownership and commodification pose serious threats to the free flow of information and freedom of speech on the Web.
In examining these issues, the seminar proposes to look at contemporary India through a study of the literary, social, and political environment that both affects and is in turn affected by the public sphere.
The Organising Committee welcomes research papers from a wide variety of interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives, and submissions are organised into (but not necessarily confined to) the streams and sub-streams listed below:
World Wide Web: the new public sphere?
Is social media driving the contemporary public sphere?
From exclusive to insular: the contemporary public sphere.
Public sphere and minorities.
Public sphere and the study of democracies.
Public sphere as the central arena for societal communication.
Public sphere: a normative theory?
Public sphere and manufactured consent.
New Media: a substitute for authentic discourse?
Citizenship via cyberspace.
Prospective participants are requested to send a 300 words long abstract to mlncconf2022@gmail.com with a 50-words bio-note.
Points to Remember:
➢ Conference Dates: 21st – 23rd March, 2022
➢ Abstract Submission Deadline: 15th February, 2022
➢ Results of abstract review returned to authors: by 18th February, 2022
➢ Submission of final paper: 01st March, 2022
➢ Registration Fee: INR 500 for paper readers.
➢No registration fee for participants.
➢ Final date of registration and fee payment: 01st March, 2022
For any questions or queries please write to: mlncconf2022@gmail.com
Keynote Speaker
Keynote Speaker
PROF. FRANCESCA ORSINI
Francesca Orsini is Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London, and the author of The Hindi Public Sphere and Print and Pleasure.
Prof. Francesca Orsini is Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She taught at University of Cambridge before joining SOAS in 2006. She is a fellow of the British Academy and also a member of Steering Committee of the British Comparative Literature Association and of the Institute of World Literature. She has also been a Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow from 2013-14 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
She is a literary historian whose research interests are multilingualism, Hindi, Urdu and the public sphere, and print history. Her works have redefined various key debates of the academic sphere. She has made important interventions in furthering the study of works in Hindi, Urdu, and Indo-Persian texts. Her research and various publications have revolved around a multilingual approach to literary history. She is also associated with 5-year multi-sited project funded by European Research Council titled “Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies: For a New Approach to World Literature” which explores the various meaning and interpretations of worlds of literature, and studies it from the perspective of multilingual societies. It approaches world literature from the comparative perspectives of North India, the Maghreb and the Horn of Africa.
Prof. Orsini's PhD at SOAS led to the seminal book The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (2002). Her publications and research projects have only widened to include diversified languages and their study which have resulted in Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (2009) which explored the print culture in nineteenth century North India.
She has edited Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (2006), Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture (2010), After Timur Left which focuses on cultural production in fifteenth-century north India (2014) and Tellings and Texts (with Katherine Schofield 2015) on the links between literature, music and performance.
PLENARY
PROF. CHARU GUPTA
Professor of Modern India
Department of History
University of Delhi
Prof. Charu Gupta is Professor of Modern India in the Department of History, University of Delhi. Her work focuses on gender, sexuality, masculinity, caste, religious identities and vernacular literatures in early twentieth century north India. Her first book, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (Permanent Black, 2001 & Palgrave, 2002; paperbacks 2005, 2008, 2012; kindle e-book 2013), addressed print and popular culture as a significant, if ambivalent site for the reproduction of patriarchy in late colonial north India. Her monograph, The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print (Permanent Black & University of Washington Press, 2016; paperback 2017), focuses on practices of distinction and hierarchy within the Hindu community through the regulation of caste, and specifically through the impact of caste ideology on women in the interwar period.
Her co-authored book, Contested Coastlines: Fisherfolk, Nations and Borders in South Asia (Routledge, 2008, 2018), probed the troubled journeys of coastal fisherfolk arrested and jailed by India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh for having entered each other’s territorial waters. She also regularly writes academic articles in Hindi and is the author of the book Streetva Se Hindutva Tak: Aupaniveshik Bharat Mein Yaunikta Aur Saampradayikta(Rajkamal, 2012). She has edited various books, including Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism (Orient Blackswan, 2012) and Caste and Life Narratives (Primus, 2019). She has been the guest co-editor of special issues of the journals South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and Cultural Dynamics. She has published more than forty peer reviewed papers in leading journals, including in Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, South Asia, Journal of Women’s History, Economic & Political Weekly, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Studies in History, Porn Studies and South Asian History and Culture.
Prof. Gupta earned her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She has been a Visiting Professor and ICCR Chair at the University of Vienna, a Visiting Faculty at the Yale University, the Washington University and the Ram Watamull Distinguished Scholar at the University of Hawaii. She has also been a Commonwealth Scholar at SOAS; Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi; the Social Science Research Council, New York; the Asian Scholarship Foundation, Thailand; the Wellcome Institute, London; and the University of Oxford.
PROF. VEENA NAREGAL
Professor
Institute of Economic Growth
Delhi
Prof. Veena Naregal is Professor in the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. She is a social scientist who has published scholarly articles on the cultural and political history of western India and on media reform and distribution in India since liberalisation. Her work focuses on the shift from orality to print culture as the framework to study the history of Marathi theatre and performative forms in the late 19th century. Her research interests include language and Indian democracy, disciplinary/institutional histories and regional theatre histories.
Prof. Veena's PhD at SOAS led to the seminal book English in the Colonial University and the Politics of Language : The Emergence of a Public Sphere in Western India (1830-1880) (ProQuest, 1998) which is a study of the bilingual relation between English and Marathi and traces the hierarchical relation between the English and vernacular spheres in the Bombay-Pune region.
She has published extensively in the field of language politics and public sphere. Some of her well acclaimed works include "Figuring the Political as Pedagogy: Colonial Intellectuals, Mediation and Modernity in Western India" (2001), "Performance, Caste, Aesthetics" (2010), "The Fight for Turf and the Crisis of Ideology: Broadcasting Reform and Media Distribution Networks in India" (2012), "Historicizing Development Discourse and Higher Education Policy in India" (2018), Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere: Western India Under Colonialism (2001).
VENUE
VENUE
The conference will be held in online mode.
The conference will be held in online mode.
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Let us know if you'll be attending!
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