Mocking and Making: Subjugation and Suppression of Marginalized and the Politics of Identity

• Authors: Sohaib Alam , Sadaf Khalid , Farhan Ahmad , Muhammed Salim Keezhatta
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Aim. The present study aims at foregrounding the importance of language and discourses advanced to suppress the voices of dissent and minorities. The subtle art of stimulating a psychologically suppressed identity or subjective violence is either through making or mocking historical facts, cultures, and human activities manifesting the concept of authoritarian democracy. Further, the aim of the study is to grasp the sense of constraints between universality and particularity that denounces the ‘reassertion of identity,’ among Indian Muslims. Moreover, the study judiciously examines disguised ‘mechanisms’ employed under authoritarian politics, tech-populism and journalism intending to promote businesses, dissemination of misinformation and contributes to creating an apocryphal human history, social alienation, and to discrediting an individual’s spontaneity.Concept. The innate unity in a democratic society can be actualised either by envisaging or by translating the texts, thoughts, language and actions, which are altogether conceiving distinctive meanings to morality, ethnicity and culture having its relevance in the contemporary context. The paper features multiple trends/cases of how a single-party monologue has weakened pluralism along with the domination of othering the ‘Others’ under racial, cultural, and national particularism. The paper qualitatively investigates different incidents of transcreation of discourse in establishing or reclaiming the identity contextualised in Frantz Fanon’s declaration of ‘reclaiming the past.’Results and conclusion. An ingenious discussion on dynamic languages, cultures and action enriches with time and individual incidents are discussed in the study. It re-evaluates the significance of revisiting the history to reclaim, reform, and reconstruct malleable identity and ideologies that take years to build, improvise and restore diversityabove majoritarian dogmatism in India.  Originality. An inquiry into how thoughts, languages, and human action intertwined are to build a complaisant or contemptuous human identity is the idea behind the article. Indeed, the study’s originality depends on sorting and revisiting numerous dimensions of translation and transcreation of languages, linguistic structure, ideology,and political intent in recent times, either subjugating or falsifying facts against the marginalized in India. The attempt is based on analyzing how the shift in knowledge, culture and social identity construction supersede the less powerful. It is practiced through utilizing tech support, popular mass culture and evolves a discourse to manipulate andmobilize human consciousness for commercial and political gains.

Keywords

EN

Subjugation, Identity, Politics, History, Culture, Marginalized

• Publisher: Fundacja Pro Scientia Publica
• Journal: Journal of Education Culture and Society
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 375-389

Dates

published

2021-06-17

Contributors

author

Sohaib Alam

• Department of English, College of Sciences and Humanities in Al Kharj Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia

author

Sadaf Khalid

• Research scholar, Dept. of Political Science, Aligarh Muslim University, India

author

Farhan Ahmad

• Department of English Studies, Faculty of Indian and Foreign Languages Akal University, Talwandi Sabo, India

author

Muhammed Salim Keezhatta

• Department of English, College of Science and Humanities in Al Kharj, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Alkharj, Saudi Arabia

References

• Adorno, T. W. (1954). How to look at television. The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television, 8(3), 213-235.
• Adorno, T. W., & Bernstein, J. M. (2001). The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture. London: Routledge.
• Anand A. (2020a). Having scripted a drama about the Delhi violence, the police is now casting for characters. The Wire. Retrieved June 5, 2020, from https://thewire.in/politics/delhi-riots-delhi-police-arrests-muslims
• Anand A. (2020b). How the coronavirus outbreak in India was blamed on Muslims. Aljazeera. Retrieved May 16, 2020, from https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/4/18/how-the-coronavirus-outbreak-in india-was-blamed-on-muslims
• Arendt, H. (1981). The life of the mind: One/Thinking, Two/Willing. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
• Banaji S. (2018). Vigilante publics: orientalism, modernity and hindutva fascism in India. Javnost - The Public, 25(4), 333-350. doi:10.1080/13183222.2018.1463349.
• Barzun, J. M. (1961). The house of intellect. New York: Harper & Row.
• Basu A. (2018). Whither democracy, secularism, and minority rights in India?. The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 16(4), 34-46. doi:10.1080/15570274.2018.1535035.
• Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization: The human consequences. Columbia: Columbia University Press.
• Bauman, Z. (2010). Work, consumerism and the new poor. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
• Bhatt C. (2004) Democracy and Hindu nationalism. Democratization, 11(4), 133-154. doi: 10.1080/1351034042000234567.
• Bisht A. (2020). Indian police accused of targeting Muslims over anti-CAA protests. ALJAZEERA. Retrieved May 5, 2021, from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/22/indian-police-accused-of-targeting-muslims-over-anti-caa-protests
• Editorial. (2020). Survival and mobility in the midst of a pandemic. Economic and Political Weekly, 55(14), Retrieved May 5, 2021 from https://www.epw.in/journal/2020/14/editorials/survival-and-mobility-midst-pandemic.html
• Evans, D. (2016). Language and identity: discourse in the world. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Farooqui I. (2020). Citizenship as participation: Muslim women protestors of Shaheen Bagh. Economic and Political Weekly. 55(4) Retrived March 26, 2021, from https://www.epw.in/journal/2020/4/commentary/citizenship-participation.html
• Ferge, Z., & Miller, S. M. (1987). Dynamics of deprivation. Aldershot: Aldershot Gower.
• Fukuyama, F. (2018). Identity: The demand for dignity and the politics of resentment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Ghosh, S. K. (1985). On the transfer of power in India. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 17(3), 30-45.
• Jagannathan R. (2020). Why Shaheen Bagh Is 'Jihad by other Means;’ Time to end it with Strategic Intent. Swarajya. Retrieved September 23, 2020, from https://swarajyamag.com/politics/why shaheen-bagh-is-jihad-by-other-means-time-to end-it-with-strategic-intent
• Jain J. (2020). The Wire denigrates Indian culture, claims it shallow regard for 'motherhood' responsible for Safoora Zargar's incarceration. OPIndia. Retrieved September 18, 2020, from https://www.opindia.com/2020/06/the-wire-zafoora-zargar pregnancy-indian-culture-motherhood/
• Jain J. (2020b). 280-charactertweet is all it takes to destroy Indian democracy if you believe Supreme Court. Retrieved September 28 from The Print. https://theprint.in/opinion/280 character tweet-destroy-indian-democracy-supreme court/482964/
• Kabir, N. A. (2020). Identity politics in India: Gujarat and Delhi Riots. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 40(3), 395-409.
• Kabir, N. A. (2016) Muslim women in Australia, Britain and the United States: The role of ‘Othering’ and biculturalism in identity formation, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 36(4), 523-539.
• Kumar A. (2020). Indian Muslims are silent but sad. The Hindu. Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/indian-muslims-are-silent but-sad/article32289329.ece
• Kumar, S. (January 01, 2016). The time of youth: joblessness, politics and neo-religiosity in Uttar Pradesh. Economic and Political Weekly, 51(53), 102-109.
• Lauren, E. Vernon, S, & Frier, S. (2017). How Facebook’s political unit enables the dark art of digital propaganda. Retrieved November 12, 2020, from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-the-facebook-team helping-regimes-that-reach-out-and-crack-down
• Li, J., & Su, M.-H. (2020). Real Talk About Fake News: Identity Language and Disconnected Networks of the US Public’s ‘Fake News’ Discourse on Twitter. Social Media + Society. doi:10.1177/2056305120916841.
• Locke J. (2004). An essay concerning human understanding Book IV- knowledge and opinion. London: Dent.
• Mahurkar, U., & Pradhan, K. (2014). Meet the men behind Modi’s audacious election campaign. India Today. Retrieved June 26, 2020, from https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/cover-story/story/20140224-narendramodi-bjp prime-ministerial-candidate-campaign-social-media-800175-1999-11-30
• Manoharan, K. R., & In Hibbard, A. (2019). Frantz Fanon: identity and resistance. Hyderabad, Telangana, India: Orient Black Swan.
• Craith, M. N, (2007). Language, power and identity politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• O'Farrell, C. (2006). Michel Foucault. London: SAGE.
• Padour, F. (April 01, 2020). Identity according to Francis Fukuyama: An obstacle to the end of history. Politics in Central Europe, 16(1), 327-345.
• Pani N. (2010). Gandhi's concept of action and identity politics. International Journal of the Philosophical Traditions of the East, 20(2), 175-194.
• Fernández, P. J. M. (2017). ‘Reasons of state for any author’ common sense, translation, and the international republic of letters. In: A. S. Wilkinson, A. U. Lorenzo (Eds.), A Maturing Market. The Iberian World in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century. Leiden: Brill.
• Purnell N., Horwitz J. (2020). Facebook's hate-speech rules collide with Indian politics. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved September 25, 2020, from https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346
• Robinson, L., Gardee, R., Chaudhry, F., & Collins, H. (April 03, 2017). Muslim youth in Britain: Acculturation, radicalization, and implications for social work practice/training. Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Social Work, 36, 266-289.
• Nasir R. (2020). Contradictions in the Khilafat movement & transformations in Abul Kalam Azad: a historical analysis of Muslim politics in British India – 1912–1947, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 40(2), 1-16.
• Scroll.in (2020). IIT-Kanpur sets up panel to investigate if Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poem 'Hum Dekhenge' is 'anti Hindu. Retrieved 1 May, 2021, from https://scroll.in/latest/948515/iit
• Sen. A. (2007). Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. London. Penguin.
• Spivak, Gayatri C. (2009). Outside in the teaching machine. New York: Routledge.
• Taras R. (1998). Nations and language‐building: Old theories, contemporary cases, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 4(3), 79-101.
• Taylor, M. C. (2015). Speed limits: Where time went and why we have so little left. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• The Wire (2018). Modi says no congress leader visited Bhagat Singh in jail, but that's not true. Retrived June 5, 2020, from https://thewire.in/politics/modi-no-congress-leader-visited-bhagat-singh
• Tocqueville, A., & Reeve, H. (2014). Democracy in America: Volumes I & II. New York: G. Dearborn & Co.
• Woolgar, S. (2005). Mobile back to front: Uncertainty and danger in the theory‐technology relation. In: R. Ling, P. E. Pedersen, Mobile communications: Renegotiation of the social sphere (Computer supported cooperative work) (pp. 23–44). London: Springer.
• Zain A. (2019). Rise of Modi's tech-populism in India. Journal of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Communication, Hacettepe University, 6(1), 199-208.

Identifiers

DOI

10.15503/jecs2021.1.375.389