Troisième événement de la série de conférences « La Diaspora sud-asiatique : politique, genre et rituels »

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Série de conférences « La Diaspora sud-asiatique : politique, genre et rituels »
Centre d’études et de recherches sur l’Inde, l’Asie du Sud et sa diaspora (CERIAS)

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Troisième conférence de la série:

Imagining a home(land) within a nation: Caste, religion and the transnational mobilization for Telangana Gadda

In June 2014, the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, was bifurcated into two separate states – the new state of Telangana and the truncated state of Andhra Pradesh. The bifurcation was a successful culmination of a long-standing demand that started in the late 1960s as a student led radical left movement. By 1998, the agitation became transnational when a few high skilled diasporic members from the Telangana region domiciled in the US found a common cause with their brethren “back home”, thereby stretching the movement from a localized topography, onto a transnational plane. This paper examines the socio-political imaginaries of the Telangana gadda (Telangana [home]land) that animated the movement.

While the meaning of what is and what constitutes the political in these imaginaries was heterogenous, my research shows that it was threatened by universalizing tendencies which produced gradient imaginaries, engendering possibilities of violence and exclusion. Historically Telangana was part of the independent Hyderabad State ruled by Muslim Nizams with a sizeable Muslim, scheduled caste, scheduled tribe and backward caste population and interceded by violent (Maoist) struggle over land. Yet the agitation within the diaspora obfuscated this history, drawing instead from a discourse mediated by social relations of caste and cultural values of Brahmanical and folk Hinduism. The movement imagined and venerated the yet-to-be state as an almost sacrilized space embodied in Telangana Talli or Mother Telangana and revived the “tribal” Bonalu and “upper caste” Bhatkamma festivals in the diaspora, translated and modernized to suit the diasporic sensibilities. Using multi-sited ethnography and historical analysis, this paper untangles the ways in which caste and religion intersected, thereby strengthening the transnational networks that legitimised diasporic mobilization for a movement that was once considered radical.

Conférencière :

Sanam Roohi

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