2024
A Roundtable on the Indian Election”
Date and Time: 14 June, 2pm
Venue: Holborn’sches Haus, Rote Straße 34,
37073 Göttingen
Speakers:
Sankaran Krishna (University of Hawai’i, Manoa)
Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (IISER Mohali)
Lalit Vachani (CeMIS)
Srirupa Roy (CeMIS)
Find the pdf here
Venue: Holborn’sches Haus, Rote Straße 34,
37073 Göttingen
Speakers:
Sankaran Krishna (University of Hawai’i, Manoa)
Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (IISER Mohali)
Lalit Vachani (CeMIS)
Srirupa Roy (CeMIS)
Find the pdf here
2017/42 min/ Bengali & English with English subtitles
Director: Malini Sur
Discussants: Angela Francke, Professor for Transport Economics, University of Kassel
Karin Wette, from “Radentscheid Göttingen”,Göttingen Bike Initiative.
Date & Time: 11 June, 7:30pm,
Venue: Cinema Lumiére, Geismar Landstraße 19
“Life Cycle” explores the place of the bicycle in the everyday lives of city dwellers in Kolkata. Are Kolkata’s bicycles relics of a past to be hastily discarded or are they viable, if complicated cargo vehicles in India’s burgeoning cities? Winding through Kolkata’s roads we follow the city’s daily wage-workers, teachers and environmentalists and their changing relationships to cycling. What happens when new traffic regulations impede two-wheeled travelers from riding on Kolkata’s roads? How do vendors, couriers, newspaper sellers and artists negotiate Kolkata’s roads congested with cars and other motorised transport? Who wins the battle for the road – the bicycle or the car? Life Cycle is a tribute to the bicycle in uncertain times; and its relationship to rapidly changing Indian cities.
After the screening, Malini Sur will be in conversation with Angela Francke, Professor for Transport Economics at the University of Kassel, and Karin Wette from “Radentscheid Göttingen/Göttingen Zero” (Göttingen Bike Initiative/Göttingen Zero).The conversation will be followed by a Q & A. The event will be in English & German.
Find the pdf
For more info: karin.klenke@cemis.uni-goettingen.de
Discussants:
Christophe Jaffrelot (Sciences Po / King’s College London),
Sankaran Krishna (University of Hawai’i, Manoa)
Nate Roberts (CeMIS)
Moderator: Rupa Viswanath, CeMIS
Date and time: 27 June, 3pm
Venue:Emmy-Noether-Saal, Tagungszentrum Alte Mensa, Wilhelmsplatz 3
Defying the dire predictions that attended its birth as an independent nation-state in 1947, the Indian republic is more than seventy-five years old. And yet, it is a place where criticisms of actually existing democracy are intense and strident. In recent years, the trope of victimized people suffering at the hands of a predatory elite and political dysfunction has reaped rewards. The populist language of redemptive outsiders pledging to combat a corrupt system has been harnessed in successful electoral campaigns, like the majoritarian regime of Narendra Modi.
Tracking the shift from postcolonial nation-building to democracy-rebuilding, Srirupa Roy shows how the political outsider came to be a valorized figure of late-twentieth century Indian democracy, tasked with the urgent mission of curing a broken democratic system—what Roy terms "curative democracy." Drawing attention to an ambivalent political field that folds together authoritarian and democratic forms and ideas, Roy argues that the long 1970s were a crucial turning point in Indian politics, when democracy was suspended by the declaration of a national emergency and then subsequently restored. By tracing the crooked line that connects the ideals of curative democracy and the political outsider to the populist antipolitics and strongman authoritarian rule in present times, this book revisits democracy from India, and asks what the Indian experience tells us about the trajectory of global democratic politics.
Srirupa Roy is Professor and Chair of State and Democracy at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen.
Find more information about the book here