Indian emigrant, since birth. I have spent most of my life in Netherlands, and not-insignificant time in Iran and Turkmenistan.[1] I edit on topics concerning S. Asian History (sp. Northwestern India, Bengal, and Northeastern India) and Turkmenistan. Rarely, Dutch politics.
I do not own any other account over any other internet-platform and anybody who claims otherwise is impersonating me.[2]
Thanks!
[D]ecolonizing intellectual history cannot mean simply supplementing, or even substituting, in the classroom the study of elite white men with elite brown men, the teaching of canonical European texts with canonical South or East Asian texts. It cannot be reduced to appointments of a few elite-non-white academics to positions in intellectual history—ticking the diversity box—while keeping old hierarchies of academic power intact. In any case, how would replacing Hobbes with Kautilya in the curriculum change anything? Kautilyan statecraft was as bent on exploiting human and nonhuman beings as the Hobbesian one.Studying Ottoman, Qing, or Tokugawa intellectual history is not intrinsically emancipatory. An appropriate analogy for the logic of canon/personnel-substitution is supplied by many postcolonial Asian, African, and Latin American states, which took over the governmental-military machinery of the European powers and enthusiastically robbed their poorer citizens, exterminated minorities, and decimated indigenous environments in the name of [decolonial] progress.The postcolonial state was a betrayal, more than a realization, of many anti-colonial dreams. Nehruvian developmentalist ideology won only through tremendous violence—by suppressing popular revolutions in Telangana and Tripura; by submerging the anti-statist thought of figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Kazi Nazrul Islam; by suppressing the decolonial anti-extractivist environmentalism of Rabindranath Tagore; through settler-colonial operations, from Northeast and Central India to the Andamans and Kashmir. If strongman leadership and predatory capital conjoin today, from Modi’s India to Erdoğan’s Turkey, the fatal bond has a prehistory.
——Decolonize Intellectual History! An Agenda for the Capitalocene: Banerjee, Milinda. 19 May 2021, Journal of the History of Ideas Blog.
ॐ वज्रसत्त् हूं
Articles I have created or rewrote or taken to GA
Karkota Dynasty and Utpala Dynasty — Written from scratch: part of a (temporally stalled) project to get FAs of our articles on pre-Islamic Kashmir.
^Since somebody enquired on an email, I am willing to scan material exclusively available at Türkmenistanyň döwlet kitaphanasy. Expect a turnaround time of about 6 months, if not more. Cheers!
^This disclaimer is motivated from the discovery of an eponymous Twitter account who claims to engage in paid advocacy. Relevant evidence, if any, shall be mailed to paid-en-wpwikipedia.org.