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Anurag Shukla

@Anuraag_Shukla

Nov 14

This is a fascinating article by Anand Teltumbde.

He argues that the Indian state has made the annihilation of caste structurally impossible by absorbing caste into its constitutional and bureaucratic logic instead of dismantling it.

He starts with Ambedkar’s 1951 resignation letter.

Ambedkar warned that reservations for backward classes were being shaped by political expediency, not justice. He feared the state was turning caste into a permanent administrative category with no clear end point.

What Ambedkar envisioned as a radical project of ending caste slowly morphed into a project of managing caste.

The language of “social and educational backwardness” recast caste as a legitimate basis for state action.

Read 8 tweets

Anurag Shukla

@Anuraag_Shukla

Jul 18

What if the world’s most celebrated idea of “helping the needy” is not universal, but theological?

What if social security systems today are based on a religious fiction about human beings?

SN Balagangadhara asks this unsettling question. Let’s walk through it. 🧵

Modern psychology, economics, even development policies assume that humans are needy beings.

From Maslow’s pyramid to poverty metrics, this anthropology of deficiency drives how we structure society.

But where does this idea come from?

Balagangadhara argues that it is not scientific. It is theological.

In Christian thought, the human is a sinner, defined by lack, craving redemption.

This image, secularized, becomes the “rational actor” or “needy citizen” in modern social sciences.

Read 12 tweets

Anurag Shukla

@Anuraag_Shukla

Jul 15

What if the humanities in India are not about remembering but forgetting?

What if the classroom itself is a site of loss, not inquiry?

D. Venkat Rao invites us to rethink the very foundation of knowledge.

This is a thread for those who teach, think, or remember. 🧵

We inherit the humanities as a grand civilizational archive. It speaks of reason, beauty, freedom, ethics.

But as Rao reminds us, it also speaks in the voice of empire. Its "human" was never meant to include all lives, all memories.

In India, the university recites the names of Aristotle, Rousseau, Freud, Foucault. It trains us to speak in concepts forged in European crises.

What happens when these are applied to worlds shaped by oral traditions, embodied memory, ritual continuity?

Read 16 tweets

Anurag Shukla

@Anuraag_Shukla

Jul 12

What if Indian academia is not producing knowledge but staging its simulation?

Vivek Dhareshwar calls it intellectual parasitism. A condition where concepts are consumed without being metabolized.

A thread on his radical vision for a new humanities. 🧵

Intellectual parasitism is not mimicry. It is dispossession.

It is when Foucault, Derrida, Butler are recited like mantras, their concepts floating free of the historical and social wounds that made them necessary.

Theory becomes a fetish. Thinking stops.

In this regime, the classroom is not a site of encounter. It is a theatre of citation.

Learning becomes procedural. Texts are mastered but not suffered. Concepts are deployed but never ruptured. Knowledge circulates without consequence.

Read 10 tweets

Anurag Shukla

@Anuraag_Shukla

May 5

How did the British and missionaries react to bare-chested women in South India? A story of colonial morality, caste, and cultural erasure that still shapes our thinking on dress and modesty today.

A thread 👇

A company painting of a basket maker and his wife, late 18th century.

In pre-colonial South India, women—across many castes—often went bare-chested. This was not seen as shameful. It was part of local aesthetics, climate, and caste codes. Modesty had a different meaning.

Enter the British and Christian missionaries with their Victorian morality, which equated nudity or partial nudity with "barbarism" or "backwardness".

The bare-chested woman became, to them, a symbol of India’s moral decay.

Read 6 tweets

Anurag Shukla

@Anuraag_Shukla

Jan 22, 2024

And VS Naipaul wrote so prophetically

"The construction of a mosque on a spot regarded as sacred by the conquered population was meant as an insult… an insult to an ancient idea, the idea of Ram.”

"A convert’s deepest impulse is the rejection of his origins.”

In an interview published in Outlook magazine, Naipaul had said;

"You say that Hindu militancy is dangerous. Dangerous or not, it is a necessary corrective to the history I have been talking about. It is a creative force and it will prove to be so."

"So in India at the moment, you have a million mutinies - every man is a mutiny on his own - and I find that entirely creative. It's difficult to manage, it gets very messy, but it is the only way forward."

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