Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Contemporary South Asia on 16/07/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09584935.2018.1498453
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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - ‘So called caste’
T2 - S. N. Balagangadhara, the Ghent School and the Politics of grievance
AU - Sutton, Deborah Ruth
N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Contemporary South Asia on 16/07/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09584935.2018.1498453
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - This article is concerned with the small but coherent lobby of political scholarship has emerged from a lineage of research supervision which centres on the charisma and ideas of S. N. Balagangadhara, a philosopher from the Centre for the Comparative Science of Cultures (Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap) at the University of Ghent. In particular, it examines the deployment of his ideas in a spate of recent scholarly and social media declarations that reject the existence of caste and, by extension, caste discrimination. This scholarship - characterised by circular reasoning, self- referencing and a poverty of rigour - has established a modest, if contentious and poorly reviewed, presence in academic spheres of dissemination. The ‘Ghent School’ describes a group of scholars who rely conspicuously on Balagangadhara’s concept of ‘colonial consciousness’, a crude derivative of Said’s thesis of Orientalism. The Ghent School maintain that all extant scholarship on Hinduism, secularism and caste represent an endurance of colonial distortions that act to defame India as a nation. This politics of affront finds considerable traction in diasporic contexts but has little, if any, resonance when mapped against the far more complex politics of caste in India.
AB - This article is concerned with the small but coherent lobby of political scholarship has emerged from a lineage of research supervision which centres on the charisma and ideas of S. N. Balagangadhara, a philosopher from the Centre for the Comparative Science of Cultures (Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap) at the University of Ghent. In particular, it examines the deployment of his ideas in a spate of recent scholarly and social media declarations that reject the existence of caste and, by extension, caste discrimination. This scholarship - characterised by circular reasoning, self- referencing and a poverty of rigour - has established a modest, if contentious and poorly reviewed, presence in academic spheres of dissemination. The ‘Ghent School’ describes a group of scholars who rely conspicuously on Balagangadhara’s concept of ‘colonial consciousness’, a crude derivative of Said’s thesis of Orientalism. The Ghent School maintain that all extant scholarship on Hinduism, secularism and caste represent an endurance of colonial distortions that act to defame India as a nation. This politics of affront finds considerable traction in diasporic contexts but has little, if any, resonance when mapped against the far more complex politics of caste in India.
KW - S. N. Balagangadhara
KW - Ghent School
KW - caste
KW - caste violence
KW - Hindu nationalism
U2 - 10.1080/09584935.2018.1498453
DO - 10.1080/09584935.2018.1498453
M3 - Journal article
VL - 26
SP - 336
EP - 349
JO - Contemporary South Asia
JF - Contemporary South Asia
SN - 0958-4935
IS - 3
ER -